[Xastir] non-kernel mkiss app usefulness?

[Jason Winningham]

I've been kicking around the ever-present not-enough-serial-ports  
problem (and it's been kicking back, but we won't talk about that).

It wouldn't be terribly difficult or expensive to put together a  
serial "mux" using a microcontroller so that data from multiple  
devices could be multiplexed/demuxed over a single serial port to the  
computer.  The problem is on the computer end.

I know there's the mkiss module for the linux kernel, but I don't do  
linux.

One solution would be to add multiport KISS support to xastir, but  
I'm not ready to take that one on.

Another solution would be a standalone mkiss type utility that runs  
outside the kernel.  This type of utility should be portable to other  
systems, like Mac OS X or Solaris (maybe cygwin, but I don't know  
enough about cygwin to know for sure).  Since all the linux mkiss  
does is create some named pipes, I see no real reason why that  
couldn't be done outside the kernel just as effectively, and much  
more portably.

I'm soliciting opinions on the potential usefulness of such an  
approach.  Since it would require non-standard external hardware I  
don't know how useful it would really be to anyone except myself.  It  
might be simpler to just hack out xastir code and be done with it.

Bluetooth would be an elegant solution, but I'm not quite ready to  
spend $75 a port on Bluetooth.

-Jason
kg4wsv