Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 04:06:21 +0800 (WST) From: Peter Wemm <peter@jhome.DIALix.COM> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: Specialix serial card driver in -current Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.950927032341.3224H-100000@jhome.DIALix.COM>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi all, This is somewhat late, but it's a kind-of announcement for the Specialix serial card driver in -current. What is it? Specialix International have a product range available in most areas of the world (including Europe, USA, Australia, Asia). The SI and XIO serial card system has two components.. A "host adapter", a 50 pin cable and remote daisy-chained 4 and 8 port panels. You can have up to 4 XIO panels on a host adapter for a total of 32 ports. The SI panels can have two modules for a maximum of 16 ports. The host adapter has an on-board CPU that maintains the remote modules, and provides a 256 byte FIFO on both the transmit and receive lines for each of the 32 ports. The XIO panels have two (I think) CD1400 family high speed uarts, these are maintained by the on-board CPU. The XIO panels can have all ports run at 115,200 baud, while the SI panels can be run at a maximum of 57,600. The host card uses a 32K shared memory window in the ISA "hole", and can in theory be run in any non-cached memory area in the first 16MB of memory - but the driver does not quite support operation outside the traditional "hole" from 0xC0000 through 0xEFFFF. The host cards do not use any IO addresses. The host card can use IRQ's 11, 12 or 15 (only!), so at present you can only have 3 host adapters in the system at once for a total of 96 ports. With some minor modifications, the driver can support 4 adapters for a total of 128 ports once polling has been implemented. The driver supports the tty, cua, initial and lock state devices. There is a small utility (sicontrol) to tune the interrupt trigger levels, although this is rapidly becoming obsolete.. :-) Theoretically, there is EISA support, but I've not tested it. I do not expect it to work first go, but the basic support is there. I do expect there will still be some bugs lurking around in the code, so I wouldn't reccomend going out and purchasing 10,000 of them to use with FreeBSD quite yet.. :-) If you have one of these cards, or can borrow one, I'd very much like to hear how you go. It works for me, but I'd like to get it out for wider testing. Specialix have a page or two on http://www.specialix.com/specialix/ I beleive there is contact information there. I ask that you check there first before asking me where you can contact them, because I really dont know myself. :-) I work for somebody who gets them through a reseller... Lastly, Specialix do not endorse or support this driver, although they dont at all mind "free support" (as one of their managers put it when I asked). This isn't in -stable, so you have to try -current to test it. However, I believe it'll slot in quite nicely if somebody wants to try it - but I've not done it. The files that are part of it, or are modified to support it are: usr.sbin/sicontrol/Makefile usr.sbin/sicontrol/siconfig.8 usr.sbin/sicontrol/siconfig.c usr.sbin/pstat/pstat.c (to report on the si settings) share/man/man4/man4.i386/si.4 sys/i386/isa/si.c sys/i386/isa/sireg.h sys/i386/include/si.h sys/i386/i386/conf.c (major 68) sys/i386/conf/LINT (for an example config line) sys/i386/conf/files.i386 (to get the files to link in) etc/etc.i386/MAKEDEV (to make the /dev nodes) As well, bin/ps, usr.bin/w and usr.bin/finger have a slightly larger tty column to allow room for the larger Specialix (and Digiboard) device names. Please let me know any success and failure stories, and let me know when you find bugs.. I've been pounding it for a while now, It's been running my ppp link to the outside world for about 2 months now. It has not had any commercial grade stress testing though. Please dont ask where you can get them from, or how much they cost, because I really dont know the price variations outside of Australia. -Peter
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.91.950927032341.3224H-100000>