Recommendations for a serial port card you can actually BUY?

[Karl Denninger]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 06:29:43PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Thursday 05 October 2006 16:21, Karl Denninger wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 12:08:22PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 10:19:25AM -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
> > > > Hi folks;
> > > > 
> > > > Ok, one of my pet peeves is coming around to bite me again.
> > > >
> > > > {snip}
> > > > 
> > > > I know serial I/O is passe for many, but some of us have applications that 
> > > > actually require it, and can't rationally be moved to anything else due 
> > > > to external hardware considerations.
> 
> I saw your first e-mail, but I am puzzled as my one rp(4) card works fine (granted,
> I haven't used it in the past 4-5 months, but it was on a machine running RELENG_6
> and served as the serial console for my test machines that I used almost daily).  I
> know of at least one other person for whom rp(4) worked fine on 6.x as I fixed both
> 6.x and 5.x to properly handle multiple rp(4) cards in a single box (the names for
> the two cards were clashing in devfs at first).
> Have you tried the rp(4) driver from the vendor's website btw?  The patch that
> ambrisko@ sent you is an attempt to merge in their changes to the driver in 
> FreeBSD, but it would be good to know if their driver works ok.

The driver on their site shows "OBSOLETE" as its status, with nothing
current to replace it.

> > Among the PCI cards only Comtrol appears to be really "in the market" with
> > anything current, and driver support in FreeBSD doesn't exist - despite the
> > claim in the Hardware Notes that its "supported", it in fact hasn't worked
> > properly since 6.0.
> > 
> > IMHO either FreeBSD's team needs to find a fix for these things or take 'em
> > out of the supported hardware list so that when people go looking they don't
> > waste time (and potentially quite a bit of money) buying something that
> > doesn't function.
> 
>While you certainly aren't having a good experience, there are counter-examples,
> so I don't think you can claim that the hardware is completely unsupported.

Under 6.x?  No.

A serial console does not require that the port actually work properly -
only that it "kinda works".  Try a fax application, or something that
actually uses VMIN/VTIME, select() and poll(), and you'll get a surprise!

BTW, this is not uncommon among "smart board" drivers.  MANY have had
problems over the years, going back to my days of Xenix, with the concept of
PROPERLY implementing serial I/O.

I have found an apparent solution - a FTDI-chipset-based 8 port USB serial
adapter with deep fifos and claims of full modem control.  We'll see once it
gets here whether it behaves or not.

--
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Karl Denninger (karl at denninger.net) Internet Consultant & Kids Rights Activist
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