Re: wrong number of serial port detected

["Jason Dravet" <dravet@hotmail.com>]

> From: Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk>
> To: Jason Dravet <dravet@hotmail.com>
> CC: bjorn.helgaas@hp.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: wrong number of serial port detected
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 15:46:28 +0000
>
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 08:24:59AM -0600, Jason Dravet wrote:
> > How is this for an idea?  The serial driver enumerates ACPI, PNPBIOS, or
> > whaterver it needs for the onboard serial ports.  If you have a PCI 
> based
> > serial card it would show up in the emuneration of the PCI bus, right?  
> For
> > the case of ISA serial cards couldn't they have an option in 
> modprobe.conf
> > to tell the kernel about the ISA serial card and the proper number of
> > serial ports on the card itself?
>
> That's already thought about and rejected.
>
> If you want to pass a string telling the serial module where the ports
> are, you could be looking at a very _long_ string.  You need to specify
> the IO address, IRQ and base baud as a minimum for every port, along
> with optional flags.
>
> Assuming 5 characters for the IO address, 1 for the IRQ, and 6 for
> the baud base, plus 2 for separators between each of these, and one
> character separator per group, you're looking at 15 characters
> minimum per port.  For 8 ports, that's 120 characters.  16 would
> be 240 characters.  If the driver is built-in to the kernel, you're
> limited to 255 characters to describe all kernel options, so you
> couldn't hope to describe 32 ports.

I was not aware that it worked like that.  My last experience with ISA cards 
was to put a line in the modules.conf that pointed to the base IO and IRQ 
for the card.  There was a serperate file that setup the serial ports.  This 
was way back in RedHat 6.x days.  Thank you for the new information.

> The alternative is something like Dave's patch which allows you to
> tell the driver the number of ports you want to support and setserial.

Dave's patch is good and I look forward to seeing it in the kernel.

Thanks,
Jason


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