Re: problem with "serial" driver in kernel 3.16.0

[Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2165 bytes --]

On 2015-09-17 09:24, 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.
Before I go any further, I would like to thank you for even considering 
this option.  If there were more vendors who tried this, Linux would 
have much better support for quite a large number of hardware devices.
> 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?
Removal is probably not an option (if there is a kernel driver for the 
chip already, there are almost certainly other drivers that use this 
chip).  As far as blacklisting goes, that would be something to take up 
with the distribution you are developing for (so Debian from what you've 
said), although you may not get much help there either if the driver 
isn't open source.  In general, it's better to either get your driver in 
the kernel at the source code level (which in turn includes help with 
ABI updates on the kernel side), or find some way to write it entirely 
in userspace (I'd suggest lucking at either the VFIO subsystem or the 
older userspace driver framework for this).


[-- Attachment #2: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature --]
[-- Type: application/pkcs7-signature, Size: 3019 bytes --]