On Thursday 05 October 2006 16:21, Karl Denninger wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 12:08:22PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 10:19:25AM -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
> > > Hi folks;
> > >
> > > Ok, one of my pet peeves is coming around to bite me again.
> > >
> > > {snip}
> > >
> > > I know serial I/O is passe for many, but some of us have applications
> > > that
> > > actually require it, and can't rationally be moved to anything else due
> > > to external hardware considerations.
I saw your first e-mail, but I am puzzled as my one rp(4) card works fine
(granted,
I haven't used it in the past 4-5 months, but it was on a machine running
RELENG_6
and served as the serial console for my test machines that I used almost
daily). I
know of at least one other person for whom rp(4) worked fine on 6.x as I fixed
both
6.x and 5.x to properly handle multiple rp(4) cards in a single box (the names
for
the two cards were clashing in devfs at first).
Have you tried the rp(4) driver from the vendor's website btw? The patch that
ambrisko@ sent you is an attempt to merge in their changes to the driver in
FreeBSD, but it would be good to know if their driver works ok.
> FreeBSD's USB support has always been somewhat deficient. For example,
> apcupsd can't talk to their UPSs over the USB bus, even though the software
> itself knows how, because FreeBSD doesn't know what a UPS is and throws up
> its hands when you plug it in. I wasn't aware that the USB to Serial
> converters would work - I can try them, but there are a lot of those out
> there that don't work right even under Windows - expecting them to under
> FreeBSD might be asking too much.
I agree that the USB support can be tricky at times. apcupsd does now work
with apcupsd on 6.1 and later though. I use it on my server at home.
> I gave up on Specialix a number of years ago after similar problems showed
> up in some of their drivers for a different OS and they were unwilling to
> fix them. Digi has always been pretty solid, but they are passe' now and
> while I have a nice stock of ISA interface cards, finding motherboards
> with ISA slots is rapidly becoming impossible.
I was trying to get the si(4) driver to support the newer adapters recently,
but wasn't able to finish that before the person decided to use rp(4) cards
instead.
> Among the PCI cards only Comtrol appears to be really "in the market" with
> anything current, and driver support in FreeBSD doesn't exist - despite the
> claim in the Hardware Notes that its "supported", it in fact hasn't worked
> properly since 6.0.
>
> IMHO either FreeBSD's team needs to find a fix for these things or take 'em
> out of the supported hardware list so that when people go looking they don't
> waste time (and potentially quite a bit of money) buying something that
> doesn't function.
While you certainly aren't having a good experience, there are counter-examples,
so I don't think you can claim that the hardware is completely unsupported.
--
John Baldwin
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