i386/100831: sio ignores BIOS information about serial ports - bounty offered

[Jo Rhett]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 07:55:42PM +1000, Bruce Evans wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Jo Rhett wrote:
> >>Description:
> >For our motherboard, "Serial A" in hardwired on the board with a 9-pin 
> >connector.  "Serial B" is a normal serial connector that can be wired 
> >anywhere.  Rackable uses this connector to connect to their out-of-band 
> >management interface.
> >
> >So in the BIOS configuration, we assign COM1 = "Serial B" and COM2 = 
> >"Serial A".  This works perfectly for the POST console redirection and 
> >FreeBSD boot process.

> I think you just need to swap the ports in /boot/device.hints?

device.hints contains what you expect.  0x3f8 should be sio0, but its not.
This is apparently ignored.

> initialization uses the apparently-higher-level resource access functions
> it is actually just using the hints, so the hints had better be correct
> -- they are more than hints.
 
Sure, but they aren't working.  That's the nature of this beast/bug.

> I don't know exactly what happens with ACPI.  Ideally, ACPI should set
> the resource values to match the BIOS, and this might involve ignoring
> most hints and this changing the values from their defaults, but for
> consoles any changes in the values would be wrong and might result in
> the high-level console (/dev/console) being attached to a different
> device than the low-level console (the one used for kernel printfs).

Exactly what I'm worried about.

-- 
Jo Rhett
senior geek
SVcolo : Silicon Valley Colocation