serial console problems under 2.4.4/5

["Narayan Desai" <desai@mcs.anl.gov>]

Hi. I have started having serial console problems in the last bunch of
kernel releases. I have tried various 2.4.4 and 2.4.5 ac kernels (up
to and including 2.4.5-ac4) and the problem has persisted. The problem
is basically that serial console doesn't recieve. I know that the
hardware works properly, and lilo and other kernels even work fine
from serial console. As far as I can tell, only one direction is
broken, serial receive. (ie, an echo foo > /dev/ttyS0 shows up on
the serial console, but an echo to the serial device on the other end
of the console never shows up)

The serial hardware is detected:
Serial driver version 5.05b (2001-05-03) with MANY_PORTS SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI enabled 
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A 
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A 

the pertinant parts of .config are:
CONFIG_SERIAL=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CONSOLE=y
# CONFIG_SERIAL_EXTENDED is not set
CONFIG_SERIAL_NONSTANDARD=y
# CONFIG_COMPUTONE is not set
CONFIG_ROCKETPORT=y
# CONFIG_CYCLADES is not set

Has anyone else seen this, or have any ideas what is broken?
thanks...
 -nld