still more on bug

Brian Buhrow buhrow at nfbcal.org
Tue Feb 14 14:14:09 EST 2012


	hello.  I'm not familiar with the internals of the Speakup code
specifically, but I think there's a lot of noise surrounding the issue of
how to support serial synthesizers on machines without native serial ports.
	the question to be resolved, which I may try to do by doing a little
reading, is how is it that Speakup talks to existing serial ports?  Does it
use its own serial driver, separate from the serial port drivers which
exist elsewhere  in the kernel, or does it call serial port drivers
elsewhere in the kernel to get its work done.  If the latter, then I
shouldn't think it would be too hard to get Speakup to use any serial
driver in the kernel.  If that can be done, then Speakup should be able to
use serial synthesizers whether they're attached to native serial ports, or
serial ports hanging off USB buses.
	I've seen some notes that indicate to me that the problem may be as
simple as figuring out what the name of the port to be used is in order to
passit to Speakup at boot time. Perhaps, if that's the case, the problem is
as simple as a documentation update.
	My point here is that at some level, a serial port should be generic
enough that it doesn't matter to the user if it's attached to the main
motherboard or if it's provided by a USB adaptor.  In this case the user is Speakup,
anD it should be calling the serial drivers in the kernel at a level above
the physical layer in order that it not have to care about where the serial
port lives.
(In traditional Unix parlants, this layer is called the tty layer, and
while mostly this layer is provided for user-level programs, kernel modules
should be able to use it too.)



More information about the Speakup mailing list