On an Asus Prime Z270-K mainboard, I’m having some trouble using a Startech PCI2S550 dual serial port card. This is Mabox with 6.2.10-1 kernel. The card says it is compatible with many Windows and Linux 3.5.x to 4.11.x LTS Versions only.
The motherboard has an integrated /dev/ttyS0, and when this card is added, /dev/ttyS4 and /dev/ttyS5 appear. So the card seems to be recognized. I have not attempted to test ttyS0 as I do not have a header for it, but am about to manually try probing those pins.
To determine which serial ports are populated, this addition was made to ~/.bashrc:
My username was added to uucp with gpasswd -a username uucp and the system rebooted.
There is an oscilloscope connected to serial pins 2 and 3 (transmit and receive) for monitoring. (I use serial quite often in an electronics repair environment.) moserial was installed for fast and easy testing. I select /dev/ttyS4 or 5, open the port, enter a string of text to send, and absolutely nothing happens - zero bits seen on the oscilloscope. Sometimes, moserial freezes for 10-60 seconds, like it is having trouble accessing the card. Any ideas? What else can I try? Thank you.
Addendum. The Startech driver download includes a Linux installation document. While small (four pages for serial and parallel cards), it did give a few interesting commands. Researching these returned a plethora of information. The following may be useful to know.
We should have many serial ports already defined in Mabox (ls -aG /dev/ttyS*), even if they do not exist physically. However if one is missing, it can be created with GNU coreutils: sudo mknod /dev/ttyS* c 4 6* where ttyS* is the port number, c means to create an (unbuffered, character) file, 4 is the major type (I/O port), and 6* is the minor type. Notice that above, ttyS0 is minor type 64 (“/dev/ttyS0”), while minor type 65 would be (“/dev/ttyS1”) etc. A huge list of all the possible major and minor numbers can be found at the Github Linux Kernel Devices List.
To get the major/minor numbers of an existing device, you can cat the device data: cat /sys/class/tty/ttyS0/uevent. This should return:
MAJOR=4
MINOR=64
DEVNAME=ttyS0
To configure this serial port card, first find its details from lspci -v:
04:01.0 Serial controller: MosChip Semiconductor Technology Ltd. PCI 9835 Multi-I/O Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 02 [16550])
Subsystem: Broadcom / LSI 2S (16C550 UART)
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 19
I/O ports at e050 [size=8]
I/O ports at e040 [size=8]
I/O ports at e030 [size=8]
I/O ports at e020 [size=8]
I/O ports at e010 [size=8]
I/O ports at e000 [size=16]
Kernel driver in use: serial
Kernel modules: parport_serial
For this particular dual-port card, in this particular PC, the two ports are addresses e050 and e040. The MosChip is physically capable of 5 serial and 1 parallel ports, but only two serial are populated on this board. Lets say we wanted to set them up as ttyS4 and ttyS5 and have entries for these in /dev. To configure these, the setserial package is needed from the AUR, so install that. Then issue the following: sudo setserial /dev/ttyS4 port e050 UART 16550A irq 19 Baud_base 115200 and sudo setserial /dev/ttyS5 port e040 UART 16550A irq 19 Baud_base 115200.
I tried this, but it would always respond with Cannot set serial info: Device or resource busy. But these were already configured by the mkinitcpio-firmware package. Had that not been installed, the above likely would have worked.