I have some questions from the DeskWriter driver studies I've asked the
-general list about.

1) How robust is support for the serial port? The DeskWriter runs at
     57600 bps, hardware handshaking. Any gotcha's other than setting
     /etc/ttys for 57600 rtscts handshaking? Oh, and no getty.

2) The printer sends a status byte every other second describing its
     state-of-affairs (idle, busy, etc). I'm thinking that it would be
     nice to have a process capture them and translate them into a
     readable status. So I (eventually) need to write a daemon. What are
     good references?

3) I want to do all this efficiently. Graphics files might be tens or
     hundreds of k long. All files will (until I learn more about
     font support) be graphics, except bare text. Also, this daemon
     will need to come alive once every other second to monitor status.
     I have ideas, but I'm not sure what's best.

Idea A: Have the daemon sit around & people/processies feed it files
     which it then spits out the serial port. It would also look at
     the input status bytes, and either write a status file or be
     ready for other processes to link to it to get the status.

Problems: A disk I/O every other second for data that doesn't need to be
     on disk seems wasteful. Actually, with the procfs, how hard is it
     to teach one program to look in another process to see a string in
     another? So anything which is interested need only look at the
     daemon's innards. How do you (I) do this?

Other problem: It seems wasteful for the daemon to have to pass all
     the data out to the printer. Is it possible for two or more processes
     to have access to a tty? Specifically I want the daemon to be
     the one to get the status bytes, but it and anyone else can write
     to the tty. I've never heard of exclusive-read, promiscuous-write
     access before.

I realize this is a bit long-winded, but I'd appreciate any input. It will
     probably be a while before the daemon appears, but I might have the
     driver problem solved soon (a beta version later this week maybe).

Thanks!

Bill