On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold@obnosis.com> wrote:

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 5:52 PM, John <jharitos@yahoo.com> wrote:

Thanks for the help Lisa. The card worked for about a year without one issue so I figured it was a hardware issue. I know one of my updates could have caused an issue. I haven't added any new hardware as well so I don't think it's not an IRQ issue.

>What is your distro and kernel version? Are your kernel patches up to date?
I'm running two versions of Ubuntu with one being 10.04 for my home PC and 9.10 for my mythtv. Ultimately, I need the additional serial port in my mythtv PC. Kernels are 2.6.31-20-generic for 9.10 and 2.6.32-22-generic for 10.04. I tried the new serial card in both PCs and it doesn't work in either.

>What is the name and serial number of the card? Have you researched drivers for your distro?
Info on my new card is very bleak as I've found nothing on the numbers given in lspci 5372:6872.

--- On Tue, 5/11/10, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold@obnosis.com> wrote:

From: Lisa Kachold <lisakachold@obnosis.com>
Subject: Re: Udev rules and built-in kernel modules
To: "Main PLUG discussion list" <plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
Date: Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 2:54 AM

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:50 PM, John <jharitos@yahoo.com> wrote:

My computer setup needs two RS232 (serial) interfaces. I have the motherboard one and I also have a separate PCI card (4348:3253). The separate card has been going on the fritz since sometimes it just stops working. I bought another PCI serial card and I thought I could swap them out. Unfortunately, the new card (5372:6872) doesn't load the serial kernel driver like the old card. When I do a lspci -v for the old card it says kernel driver=serial and for the new card nothing is listed. I do an udevadm for both and the old one says serial and the new one says serial8250. Not sure why it doesn't say serial8250 when I do a lspci -v for the new card. Can you write a udev rule to load the correct built-in driver? Also, I did a cat on the modules.builtin and it shows serial_core.ko, 8250.ko, 8250_pnp.ko, 8250_pci.ko. I thought I would see a serial.ko and serial8250.ko as well. Any suggestions or am I out of luck on the serial card?

An intermittant PCI card issue could actually be an IRQ or DMA, UART issue. What are your bios settings? Have you verified that there is not a conflict?

There is a known UART bug (registered by Linus Torvalds) in Serial8250
fix-serial-8250-UART_BUG_TXEN-test:

What is your distro and kernel version? Are your kernel patches up to date?

What is the name and serial number of the card? Have you researched drivers for your distro?

--
Office: (480)307-8707
AT&T: (503)754-4452
Systems Engineer
www.ivedaxpress.com

-----Inline Attachment Follows-----
Does lspci look like this?
01:08.0 Communication controller: Device 5372:6872 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic Device 0002
        Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-


        Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=slow >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 12
        Region 0: I/O ports at df00 [size=8]

        Region 1: I/O ports at de00 [size=8]

        Region 2: I/O ports at dd00 [size=8]
        Region 3: I/O ports at dc00 [size=8]
        Region 4: I/O ports at db00 [size=8]
        Region 5: I/O ports at da00 [size=16]
Have you tried googling like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS300&q=LSI+Logic+Symbios+5372+6872&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

or like this:?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS300&ei=DFDrS42WA8WqlAfew7GcBA&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CBEQBSgA&q=LSI+Logic+Symbios+5372+6872+Logic+Device+Spec+Cycle&spell=1

I believe there might sufficient information to obtain the driver here:

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/devices/lxr/http/source/linux/drivers/ieee1394/oui.db?v=2.6.11.8

This looks interesting from googlecode:

http://code.google.com/p/roboticsby/source/browse/trash/system+information+detection+module/video+card/pci_c_header.h?spec=svn5&r=5

And there is this:

http://swiss.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1477438

Have you tried:

dmesg | grep Lsi
dmesg | more

Get vendor and product code

Note if this is a usbserial device:
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x4348 product=0x5523

or
modprobe serial vendor=0x5372 product=0x6872

dmesg

Near the end, you should see verification blah that it loaded successfully:

or serial_generic #: loaded
serial: attached to blah
serial: registered new interface driver LSI

Note you might also try:

modprobe lsi

dmesg

See the full HowTo here:
http://linux.about.com/od/srl_howto/a/hwtsrl07t03.htm

Congratulations, your link is up! As much fun as you had doing this, there is some chance you want to do this automatically in the future. Just add this line:

serial vendor=0x5372 product=0x6872

to /etc/modules with the vendor and product numbers.

Now, you should have no problem using this device like a normal serial port. Hurrah!

Since DOS provided for 4 serial ports on the old ISA bus: COM1-COM4, or ttyS0-ttyS3 in Linux, most serial ports on the newer PCI bus used higher numbers such as ttyS4 or ttyS14 (prior to kernel 2.6.13). But since most PCs only came with one or two serial ports, ttyS0 and possibly ttyS1 (for the second port) the PCI bus can now use ttyS2 (kernel 2.6.15 on). All this permits one to have both ISA serial ports and PCI serial ports on the same PC with no name conflicts. 0-1 (or 0-3) are reserved for the old ISA bus (or the newer LPC bus) and 2-upward (or 4-upward or 14-upward) are used for PCI, where older schemes are shown in parentheses . It's not required to be this way but it often is.

If you're using udev (which puts only the device you have on your computer into the /dev directory at boottime) then there's an easy way to change the device names by editing files in /etc/udev/. For example, to change the name of what the kernel detects as ttyS3 to what you want to name it: ttyS14, add a line similar to this to /etc/udev/udev.rules
BUS=="pci" KERNEL=="ttyS3", NAME="ttyS14"

On-board serial ports on motherboards which have both PCI and ISA slots are likely to still be ISA ports. Even for all-PCI-slot motherboards, the serial ports are often not PCI. Instead, they are either ISA, on an internal ISA bus or on a LPC bus which is intended for slow legacy I/O devices: serial/parallel ports and floppy drives.