Ubuntu kernel 2.6.24 with Fintek F81216 on NOVA 9452 MoBo

[James]

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.