pl2303 lockups on rpi2

[Ian Lepore]

On Sat, 2016-06-18 at 17:36 -0700, bob prohaska wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 09:34:30PM -0700, Hal Murray wrote:
> > 
> > How solid is your power?
> > 
> 
> The three RPI2s that I can check easily are all over 5 Volts. The
> fourth is hard to get at, but it shares the same power supply type
> and is unlikely to be significantly different.
> 
> Swapping places between the two adapters that locked up with the 
> two that kept working didn't turn out as planned. The two adapters 
> that were failing still failed, but one that hadn't failed up to 
> then did, in about 48 hours. 
> 
> The one encouragement is that updating to r301978 and rebooting
> unstuck an adapter that had locked up under r301569. Up to now
> it's been necessary to expose the adapters to Prolific's driver
> to unstick them. Unplugging and replugging didn't help.
> 
> There seem to be nine supported USB-serial adapter types, can you
> suggest a better bet if I have to go shopping again? I can't find
> kind words about any of them.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> bob prohaska

While I've heard more good things than bad about freebsd's support of
pl2303, the one I can personally vouch for is FTDI.  We use them
extensively at $work, which means basically I get paid to maintain the
freebsd driver for them.

While FTDI adapters are great, there have been problems with
counterfeit hardware.  Buy from a reputable source, and if somebody is
offerring a crazy-low price on them, it's probably not genuine FTDI.

-- Ian