Ubuntu kernel 2.6.24 with Fintek F81216 on NOVA 9452 MoBo

[Ike Panhc]

Hi James,

The blog of Dennis_Hsieh said the following:

Please use setserial to set the IRQ of UART port of F81216 to 0 to active it in polling mode

If you want to use them in interrupt mode, you have to modify the BIOS of your MoBo to let
F81216 not to report anything to ACPI, then you should use setserial to set those 4 UART with
the same IRQ (he did not say which IRQ number).


I can only help you to translate what Dennis' word because I dont have a MoBo with F81216.

I hope it could help you.

-- Ike

James wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not sure if this is a bug as such, no kernel oops, but unsupported
> hardware, or misconfiguration perhaps?  Let me explain...
> 
> I've got a NOVA-9452 MoBo, and as far as I can tell it has a Fintek
> F81216DG quad UART chip on a LPC bus.
> 
> The BIOS reports that the board has 2 standard UARTs at 3f8/irq4 and
> 2f8/irq3, then 4 more UARTs at 3e8, 2e8, 2f0 and 2e0.  There is no IRQ
> assignment in the BIOS for these 4 UARTs.
> 
> I've installed Ubuntu 8.04 on to a 4GB CF with net install cli only, and
> it works a charm.
> 
> With the standard Ubuntu 8.04.2 kernel (2.6.24-23-generic), there are
> only 4 serial ports supported.
> 
> I installed the kernel sources, started with the generic config, and
> made it capable of supporting 8 serial ports (I thought the standard 4
> plus the Fintek 4 = 8).
> 
> Rebuilt and ran the new kernel, 2.6.24.6, with extra serial port
> capabilities.
> 
> Now dmesg reports the following.
> 
> [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
> [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
> [    0.000000] Linux version 2.6.24.6 (root at rti8000lin) (gcc version 4.2.4 (Ubuntu 4.2.4-1ubuntu3)) #3 SMP Fri Apr 24 08:34:09 EST 2009 (Ubuntu 2.6.24-23.52-generic)
> 
> <snip>
> 
> [  423.904057] Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 8 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
> [  423.904269] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
> [  423.904469] serial8250: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
> [  423.904665] serial8250: ttyS2 at I/O 0x3e8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
> [  423.904864] serial8250: ttyS3 at I/O 0x2e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
> [  423.905457] 00:06: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
> [  423.905736] 00:07: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
> [  423.906022] 00:09: ttyS2 at I/O 0x3e8 (irq = 11) is a 16550A
> [  423.906291] 00:0a: ttyS3 at I/O 0x2e8 (irq = 0) is a 16550A
> [  423.906561] 00:0b: ttyS4 at I/O 0x2f0 (irq = 0) is a 16550A
> [  423.906827] 00:0c: ttyS5 at I/O 0x2e0 (irq = 0) is a 16550A
> 
> This looks very odd to me.  IRQ 11 is supposed to be reserved in the
> BIOS, and IRQ 0 ??
> 
> At least now it detects the all available serial ports.
> 
> I've done some google searching for the Fintek device and come across
> this:
> 
> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-TW&u=http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/a2267/article%3Fmid%3D380%26prev%3D419%26next%3D370&ei=CfTwSbP5M8SHkQXN0ZSlCg&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=9&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DLinux%2BFintek%2BUART%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG
> 
> Which leaves me somewhat confused.
> 
> Does anyone have some advice to help me get these Fintek UARTs working,
> or at least which list/forum to ask?
> 
> Please reply to me direct, as I'm not a subscriber to this list...
> 
> Cheers,
> James.
> 
>