Using devfs.conf as a porting aide

I've recently been given the task of moving some software from FreeBSD 4.x to FreeBSD 6.x on a consulting basis. This move was very simple and easy, except for one area: serial device names.

In the great tty-rewrite to make it MP safe that was done, there were a number of name changes that were unavoidable when making the tty layer more uniform between drivers. Unfortunately, sio was one of the drivers that had its names changed. This company used many multi-port expansion cards, so finding all the places where /dev/cuaaX was hard coded was difficult.

To validate the rest of the software, I created the following /etc/devfs.conf file to allow the old names to work while I hunted down all the places they were used.

# 4.x compat names on 6.x
link cuad0 cuaa0
link cuad0.init cuaia0
link cuad0.lock cuala0
link ttyd0.init ttyid0
link ttyd0.lock ttyld0

These blocks were repeated for each of the serial devices in the system (I wrote a quick script to generate them for all 12 devices). One thing to remember is that the 11th device is named "/dev/cuada" not "/dev/cuad10", so you need to print the unit number as hex.

You could easily extend this to FreeBSD 7 the names changed again when FreeBSD moved from sio to uart.

# 6.x names on 7.x system
link cuau0 cuad0
link cuau0.init cuad0.init
link cuau0.lock cuad0.lock
link ttyu0 ttyd0
link ttyu0.init ttyd0.init
link ttyu0.lock ttyd0.lock

again, it is a simple matter to look over the unit numbers necessary.

Note, this will only work for devices that are statically created at boot time. If you have a number of usb serial devices on a newer FreeBSD system that are replacing an older sio based FreeBSD 4.x system, you may need to use devfs.rules to accomplish this transition, which is beyond the scope of this article.