Subject: Re: Time to fix a 25 year old misdesign
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/15/2000 11:33:57
[ On Sunday, October 15, 2000 at 12:12:28 (+0200), Lennart Augustsson wrote: ]
> Subject: Time to fix a 25 year old misdesign
>
>  But the audio device can actually be viewed as two
> devices: one for playback and one for recording.

Exactly.  You're proposing to fix the wrong problem.

The Unix design is still right.  The dev_close() routine must be called
only once because its sole purpose is to perform device specific actions
on the hardware that will shut down the hardware properly when there are
no other descriptors open to the device.

The design of the audio driver is what's wrong.  It must be separated
logically into different drivers that have unique functionality and once
that's done there'll be no need to call dev_close() more than once (and
indeed there'll be more reasons to only call it once!).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>