[Vm-dev] SerialPlugin support for named devices (ttyUSB0)

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Fri Apr 24 15:56:05 UTC 2009


S??verin Lemaignan has implemented support for named serial devices (e.g.
'/dev/ttyUSB0'). My understanding is that this is an important feature for
supporting SqueakBots for children in classroom settings, so it would be
nice if we can incorporate this in the main VM distributions.

The Mantis bug report and S??verin's code are at
http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7266. I added an update for SerialPlugin
that allows the new primitives to be properly generated from VMMaker, and
also changes the method signatures in SerialPlugin.h to resolve 64-bit
issues, permitting SerialPlugin to work on 64-bit Linux.

Because of the changes to SerialPlugin.h, support code changes will be
required for Windows an Mac as well as Unix. For this reason (assuming
that we agree that the changes are a good thing), we will need to schedule
a time at which the platforms and VMMaker changes can be updated within
some reasonable time window ("reasonable" meaning over a period days or
weeks as opposed to months).

Ian is away right now, so we should think about doing this at a later
date, perhaps next month if schedules permit.

I should mention also that I think we have a number of issues like this
that need coordinated updates (notably from my point of view the 64-bit FFI
updates), and it would be good to do an easy one such as the SerialPlugin
update in order to exercise the process.

Dave



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