who's hogging this UART?

[CAIannello]

Hi Everybody.

I am dinking around with a certain E-Ink-based E-Book reader which runs linux.

This device has an "accessory port" which is actually a UART (/dev/ttymxc0) that shows bootup sequence and status messages. From the bootloader, i can have it run getty and get a shell prompt on it. By default though, it ends up just periodically transmitting status messages and stuff during normal use.

I don't want to use it for this though, as I can already SSH to the device via Wifi. Instead, I want to attach a custom peripheral through this UART.

I have had some success with this, as I am able to see the output from my peripheral by just doing a "cat /dev/ttymxc0" ... but the data is sometimes getting interrupted by some other process that likes to use ttymxc0 to output status messages. I am certain these messages aren't from my peripheral, as I made the peripheral myself.

So, how can I determine which process is stealing my UART, and how can I prevent this from happening?

Thanks,
Craig

UPDATE: Oh boy, do I feel dumb. I had to edit /etc/inittab and comment out the line where getty was being set to ttymxc0