FC4: PCI modem card serial port problem with 2.6.16 kernels

[Terry Barnaby]

Terry Barnaby wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a PCI hardware modem card "Agere Systems Venus Modem (V90, 
> 56KFlex)". This has been working fine with FC4. However on updating
> to the 2.6.16-1.2069 kernel it stopped working.
> It does not work with the 2.6.16-1.2096_FC4 kernel also.
> There is a message in /var/log/messages:
> "Couldn't register serial port 0000:05:01.0: -28"
> 
> Any ideas if this is a bug or a kernel change ?
> 
> Terry
> 

I have found that I can add the kernel boot option "8250.nr_uarts=4" 
which gets around the problem. I presume the number of serial ports to
determine at boot time was configured to 2 in this release of the kernel.

1. Should the default number of seerial ports configured at boot time be 
increased ?
2. Should the hotplug system handle adding the PCI serial card at runtime ?

Cheers

Terry