Re: wrong number of serial port detected

From: Jason Dravet
Date: Sat Dec 10 2005 - 09:57:33 EST


From: Russell King <rmk+lkml@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Bjorn Helgaas <bjorn.helgaas@xxxxxx>
CC: Jason Dravet <dravet@xxxxxxxxxxx>, linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: wrong number of serial port detected
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 10:35:38 +0000

On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 12:54:44PM -0700, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> On Friday 09 December 2005 7:37 am, Jason Dravet wrote:
> > The question I have
> > is with all of this plug and play stuff in our PCs shouldn't it be possible
> > to get the correct number of ports, ask the bios or the pci bus or
> > something?
>
> Yes. ACPI (or even PNPBIOS) should tell us about all the "legacy"
> ports, and PCI or other bus enumeration should tell us about all the
> rest.

Unless I stick a serial card into an industrial PC. And yes, ISA
serial cards are still sold:

http://www.amplicon.co.uk/dr-prod3.cfm/groupId/10740/secid/10177.htm

ISA serial cards will not show up in ACPI, PNPBIOS or any other bus
enumeration scheme. The only way to use them is via setserial.

--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core

How is this for an idea? The serial driver enumerates ACPI, PNPBIOS, or whaterver it needs for the onboard serial ports. If you have a PCI based serial card it would show up in the emuneration of the PCI bus, right? For the case of ISA serial cards couldn't they have an option in modprobe.conf to tell the kernel about the ISA serial card and the proper number of serial ports on the card itself?

Thanks,
Jason


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