PCI-e rs232 card on linux

Dan ml at mutox.org
Fri Apr 7 01:12:40 UTC 2006


I have a PCI express rs232 card made by these people: www.softio.com. In
particular I am using several ic0658kb in several machines. Dell
Poweredge 850s to be precise, using the A02 bios firmware.

The softio people say their cards are supported in Linux, but I suspect
the 2.6 kernel's serial driver does not know/recognize the device id of
this card.

Here is what lspci says:

02:00.0 Class 0700: 1415:950b (prog-if 06)
        Subsystem: 1415:0001
        Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 169
        I/O ports at ecf8 [size=8]
        Memory at fe9ff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        I/O ports at ece0 [size=16]
        Memory at fe9fe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at fe9fd000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1

02:01.0 Class 0700: 1415:950b (prog-if 06)
        Subsystem: 1415:0001
        Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 50
        I/O ports at ecf0 [size=8]
        Memory at fe9fc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        I/O ports at ecd0 [size=16]
        Memory at fe9fb000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at fe9fa000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1


When inspecting dmesg I notice the following, which seems relevant at
this point:

00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:00.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:02:00.0 disabled
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:01.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 50
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:02:01.0 disabled

The softio people suggested i manually try configuring the devices with
setserial but i did not think this would work:

setserial /dev/ttyS4 Port 0xecf8 IRQ 169 UART 16950 baud_base 115200
setserial /dev/ttyS5 Port 0xecf0 IRQ 50 UART 16950 baud_base 115200

However the device nodes did not exist.

Bit of googling shows the chip used on this card has been used in pcmcia
serial controllers, but thats of little help as this device is PCI
express.

What do I need to do to get this card to work? Anyone know?

Cheers,

Dan




More information about the fedora-list mailing list