Re: problem with "serial" driver in kernel 3.16.0

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 03:24:31PM +0200, Wolfgang Wilhelm wrote:
> We are a small company FAST ComTec GmbH 
> (www.fastcomtec.com) and produce multichannel analyzers 
> with Windows software. I am the software developer and 
> would like to get our software working also under Linux 
> with the help of WINE.
> 
> I was already successfull with our USB devices and most
> of our PCI cards, but with one of the PCI cards 
> it does not work (in Debian v8, kernel 3.16.0).
> 
> Our PCI cards have a AMCC controller S5933, we use the 
> standard AMCC vendor id 0x10e8 and device id 0x8226, 
> device class serial. Most of our cards use two I/O port ranges 
> and an interrupt. I have written a linux driver for these cards 
> and could get everything working, but the interface card 
> for our MPA-3 multiparameter system uses only 
> one I/O port range and an interrupt. This card is recognized 
> by the "serial" driver in the kernel as a serial interface card 
> and there is no way to load our own driver.
> 
> My question is, could you remove in future kernel versions 
> the support for this card in the kernel our make it possible 
> to blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d/fbdev-blacklist.conf
> like other drivers that are not directly included in the kernel?

We like to include all drivers in the kernel source tree, that's the
only way to distribute kernel drivers.  So can you just submit your
driver for inclusion, that way everyone will be able to use the hardware
properly.  Look at the kernel file, Documentation/SubmittingDrivers and
Documentation/SubmittingPatches for the process on how to do this.

If you have any specific questions about this, please let me know and
I'll be glad to help you out.

thanks,

greg k-h