PCI-e rs232 card on linux

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Dan wrote:
> 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:
> 
<------------------[ SNIP ]---------------->
> 
> 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
> 
You can try using /dev/ttyS2 and /dev/ttyS3 instead of /dev/ttyS4
and /dev/ttyS5. Unless you have 4 serial ports on the motherboard
and/or ISA cards, they are probably free. Otherwise you can create
udev rules to create the device nodes.

If that does not work, you may have to load the parport_serial
module. I know I need it for the PCI 2 serial/1 parallel card
I have before the serial ports work.

Mikkel
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