Serial ports

[M D L]

The cards are a StarTech PEX4S952 four port serial adapter:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815158164&Tpk=pex4s952

I am able to use three ports off the first card (ttyS1 - ttyS3), so I know support for the cards are there.  The system doesn't have a monitor attached at the moment, so I'll have to get back to you on the status in UEFI.  

You are correct about the first being on the motherboard, and the rest being cards.  Here is what lspci shows:

01:00.0 Serial controller: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd Device c208
02:00.0 Serial controller: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd Device c208
04:00.0 Serial controller: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd Device c208
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06) On Mon,

Michael

4 Feb 2013 19:34:36 -0500 Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 7:47 PM, M D L <41magnum at liberty.eprci.com> wrote:
> > I'm running Fedora 18 on a computer that's being used to connect to a Cisco lab.  I have three serial cards of four ports
> > each, plus an unused serial header on the motherboard.  ttyS0 is assigned to the motherboard serial port.
> 
>   What flavor (make/model/etc.) are these serial cards?
> 
>   What does the motherboard BIOS/SETUP think is going on when it comes
> to serial ports (COM ports)?
> 
> > 0: uart:16550A port:000003F8 irq:4 tx:16 rx:0
> 
>   That would be the motherboard's serial port, almost certainly.  PC
> motherboards pretty much universally provide a 8250/16550 compatible
> serial interface.
> 
> > 1: uart:16C950/954 mmio:0xFEA01000 irq:18 tx:85 rx:121 CTS
> > 2: uart:16C950/954 mmio:0xFEA01200 irq:18 tx:87 rx:84 CTS|DSR
> > 3: uart:16C950/954 mmio:0xFEA01400 irq:18 tx:90 rx:320 CTS
> 
>   I'm guessing these are your expansion cards, although it could be
> that they're just three ports on one of the cards, and the kernel
> didn't look any further.
> 
> > I've tried adding 8250.nr_uarts=13 to the grub kernel boot line, but still only have ttyS0-ttyS3.
> 
>   It's unusual to have more than four true 16550 type UARTs in a PC.
> It's not, strictly speaking, impossible, but it''s unusual.  Only the
> first four have standard I/O addresses and IRQs assigned.  While in
> theory PCI makes that all automatic, I'm not sure how well it would
> work in practice.  The 8250/16550 is a fairly simple software
> interface, and doesn't support things like multi-port or high-speed
> operation.
> 
>   I Googled up a datasheet for 16C950, and it appears to be an
> "advanced" serial controller, not a true 16550 chip, but one which can
> be told to act in a compatible fashion.  So I don't think playing
> around with the 8250 driver is going to help you much.  A brief skim
> of the docs didn't find any mention of multi-port.  That might be an
> extension by whoever actually made your card's chip, or it might be
> implemented in additional logic on the card.
> 
>   Hence my question on what these cards are.  In the bad old days of
> MS-DOS, one needed a manufacturer-specific "FOSSIL" driver to enable
> multi-port serial boards.  Things are a bit better nowadays, but we
> still need to figure out what the card expects you to do to make it
> work.
> 
> -- Ben
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