Multi-port serial cards in FC2

[Dave Close]

I've recently tried to use two different brands of 8-port PCI serial
cards in an FC2 machine. It didn't work and I was forced to downgrade
the machine to FC1. This is a heads-up if you want to try anything
similar.

The machine has two on-board serial ports, ttyS0 and ttyS1, and a PCI
modem card, ttyS4. When the 8-port card is added to the system, it fails
to notice the modem and starts numbering ports with ttyS4. But it only
goes to ttyS7 and then wraps around. It does notice that 0 and 1 are
already in use so it allocates ttyS2 and ttyS3. Then it stops, giving
me only six new ports and losing the modem.

With cooperation from one of the vendors, we tried to work around the
problem using setserial. All attempts to assign any of the new ports to
ttyS8 and above failed. While the FC2 distribution creates device nodes
for ttyS8 and many others with higher numbers, it appears impossible to
actually use those nodes.

If this is a known issue, is it expected to be fixed with FC3?
-- 
Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA  "You ain't goin' nowhere, son."
dave at compata.com, +1 714 434 7359    -- Grand Ole Opry manager to
dhclose at alumni.caltech.edu              Elvis Presley, 1954