Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 22:25:50 -0600 From: "Chris Dahler" <chris.dahler@gte.net> To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Serial Ports Problem Message-ID: <004d01bf330f$56dccc20$3e941a3f@laptop>
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I have a Compaq Presario laptop, a PII 266MHz, 64M RAM, running
Win98/3.3-Release. It has an internal winmodem attached to COM2 and a
pccard faxmodem attached to COM3. The computer physically has 1 serial port
on the back which the BIOS correctly reports, but the BIOS says nothing
about any other internal ports, and further does not give me any information
about IRQ's, etc.
According to the Windows diagnostic tools I have used, the COM ports are all
set up in a normal fashion with the typical IRQ's for these ports that
FreeBSD uses as defaults.
During boot, FreeBSD always reports sio0 as found, but it reports all other
sio's as "not found", and the IRQ's for these ports as "not in the
bitmap...".
From here, things get a little odd. About half the time, FreeBSD continues
with the boot with nothing further to say about the sio ports, launches
pccardd, and reports that there is no card in the database matching ""("").
pccardc dumpcis in this case reports two slots available and no other
information. Stopping and restarting pccardd has no effect, almost as
though it were unable to see the card in the slot.
The other half of the time, FreeBSD reports the same messages about the sio
ports as I stated above, including the explicit message that sio2 is not
found at ..., and then it goes on to reporting on the hard drive and the
cdrom and so forth, and then, when the boot process is practically finished,
the line "sio2 16550A" appears, usually just before (or sometimes even
after) the login prompt appears.
When this happens, pccardd detects the card in the slot normally, and
pccardc dumpcis will report all the tuples in a nice long list. pccardd
will invariably report that it is unable to allocate resources for this
card, but that's a whole other problem I'll deal with later. What gets me
is that I can just login as root at this point, do nothing else but issue
the "reboot" command, and during the subsequent boot process, sio2 will have
mysteriously disappeared again. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to
when FreeBSD is able to detect this port.
This problem is completely baffling to me. Why would FreeBSD report
initially that sio2 is not found, and then change its mind later on in the
boot? Why would it be able to detect this port at all only half the time?
My computer seems like it should be a fairly plain-vanilla construction
rather than some weird off-the-wall mix of odd peripherals that was put
together in someone's garage... has anyone encountered this problem before?
Chris Dahler
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