Re: [PATCH] [v3] serial: 8250: remove obsolete and broken PORT_RSA support

From: Andy Shevchenko

Date: Mon Oct 19 2026 - 06:35:30 EST


On Mon, Oct 19, 2026 at 11:39:20AM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2026 at 10:56:55AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

> > For all I can tell, the RSA support in the 8250 driver is not functional
> > and has not been for a long time.
> >
> > The RSA-DV II/S ISA card[1] was sold by IODATA in the 1990s as a faster
> > alternative to regular ISA serial ports, and it was discontinued in
> > 2002. Linux support was added by Kiyokazu SUTO in 2000.
> >
> > The driver defines an I/O port base address of -8 (negative eight),
> > which should always get refused by request_region on all architectures
> > for being outside of the valid resource range.
> >
> > Further, it seems that a patch to setserial would be required in order
> > to set PORT_RSA when not using autoconfiguration.
> >
> > This patch removes all code related to the RSA support, with the exception
> > of the user-visible PORT_RSA definition.
> >
> > Link: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.iodata.jp/products/network/rsadv2s.htm
> > Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/1309211120-2803-6-git-send-email-arnd@xxxxxxxx/

> Any objection for me to sneak this into 7.4-rc1?

This is a good removal change, but I would like to make Link tags neater, if
Arnd sends a v4 sooner, I will tag it for early v7.4 (which is indeed a good
candidate to have this).

--
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko