Serial HOWTO
David S.Lawyer dave@lafn.org original by Greg Hankins
v2.08 June 2000

This document describes serial port features other than those which
should be covered by Modem-HOWTO, PPP-HOWTO, Serial-Programming-HOWTO,
or Text-Terminal-HOWTO. It lists info on multiport serial cards. It
contains technical info about the serial port itself in more detail
than found in the above HOWTOs and should be best for troubleshooting
when the problem is the serial port itself. If you are dealing with a
Modem, PPP (used for Internet access on a phone line), or a Text-Ter�
minal, those HOWTOs should be consulted first.
______________________________________________________________________

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1 Copyright, Disclaimer, & Credits
1.1.1 Copyright
1.1.2 Disclaimer
1.1.3 Trademarks.
1.1.4 Credits
1.2 New Versions of this Serial-HOWTO
1.3 Related HOWTO's re the Serial Port
1.4 Feedback
1.5 What is a Serial Port?

2. How the Hardware Transfers Bytes

2.1 Transmitting
2.2 Receiving
2.3 The Large Serial Buffers

3. Serial Port Basics

3.1 What is a Serial Port ?
3.1.1 Intro to Serial
3.1.2 Pins and Wires
3.1.3 RS-232 or EIA-232, etc.
3.2 IO Address & IRQ
3.3 Names: ttyS0, ttyS1, etc.
3.4 Interrupts
3.5 Data Flow (Speeds)
3.6 Flow Control
3.6.1 Example of Flow Control
3.6.2 Symptoms of No Flow Control
3.6.3 Hardware vs. Software Flow Control
3.7 Data Flow Path; Buffers
3.8 Complex Flow Control Example
3.9 Serial Software: Device Driver Module

4. Is the Serial Port Obsolete?

4.1 Introduction
4.2 EIA-232 Cable Is Low Speed & Short Distance
4.3 Inefficient Interface to the Computer

5. Multiport Serial Boards/Cards/Adapters

5.1 Intro to Multiport Serial
5.2 Making "devices" in the /dev directory
5.3 Standard PC Serial Cards
5.4 Dumb Multiport Serial Boards (with standard UART chips)
5.5 Intelligent Multiport Serial Boards
5.6 Unsupported Multiport Boards

6. Configuring the Serial Port

6.1 PCI Bus Support Underway
6.2 Configuring Overview
6.3 Common mistakes made re low-level configuring
6.4 I/O Address & IRQ: Boot-time messages
6.5 What is the current IO address and IRQ of my Serial Port ?
6.5.1 What does the device driver think?
6.5.2 What is set in my serial port hardware ?
6.5.3 What is set in my PnP serial port hardware ?
6.6 Choosing Serial IRQs
6.6.1 IRQ 0 is not an IRQ
6.6.2 Interrupt sharing and Kernels 2.2+
6.6.3 What IRQs to choose?
6.7 Choosing Addresses --Video card conflict with ttyS3
6.8 Set IO Address & IRQ in the hardware (mostly for PnP)
6.8.1 Using a PnP BIOS to I0-IRQ Configure
6.9 Giving the IRQ and IO Address to Setserial
6.10 High-level Configuring: stty, etc.
6.10.1 Configuring Flow Control: Hardware Flow Control is Best

7. Serial Port Devices /dev/ttyS2, etc.

7.1 Serial Port Device Names & Numbers
7.2 Link ttySN to /dev/modem ?
7.3 Notes For Multiport Boards
7.4 Creating Devices In the /dev directory

8. Interesting Programs You Should Know About

8.1 Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics Programs
8.2 Changing Interrupt Priority
8.3 What is Setserial ?
8.3.1 Introduction
8.3.2 Probing
8.3.3 Boot-time Configuration
8.3.4 Configuration Scripts/Files
8.3.5 Edit a script (after version 2.15: perhaps not)
8.3.6 New configuration method using /etc/serial.conf
8.3.7 IRQs
8.4 Stty
8.4.1 Introduction
8.4.2 Using stty for a "foreign" terminal
8.4.2.1 Old redirection method
8.4.3 Two interfaces at a terminal
8.4.4 Where to put the stty command ?
8.5 What is isapnp ?

9. Speed (Flow Rate)

9.1 Can't Set a High Enough Speed
9.1.1 How speed is set in hardware: the divisor and baud_base
9.1.2 Work-arounds for setting speed
9.1.3 Crystal frequency is not baud_base
9.2 Higher Serial Throughput

10. Locking Out Others

10.1 Introduction
10.2 Lock-Files
10.3 Change Owners, Groups, and/or Permissions of Device Files

11. Communications Programs And Utilities

11.1 List of Software
11.2 kermit and zmodem

12. Serial Tips And Miscellany

12.1 Line Drivers
12.2 Known Defective Hardware
12.2.1 Avoiding IO Address Conflicts with Certain Video Boards
12.2.2 Problem with AMD Elan SC400 CPU (PC-on-a-chip)

13. Troubleshooting

13.1 Serial Electrical Test Equipment
13.1.1 Breakout Gadgets, etc.
13.1.2 Measuring Voltages
13.1.3 Taste Voltage
13.2 Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics
13.3 (The following subsections are in both the Serial and Modem HOWTOs)
13.4 My Serial Port is Physically There but Can't be Found
13.5 Extremely Slow: Text appears on the screen slowly after long delays
13.6 Somewhat Slow: I expected it to be a few times faster
13.7 The Startup Screen Show Wrong IRQs for the Serial Ports.
13.8 "Cannot open /dev/ttyS?: Permission denied"
13.9 "Operation not supported by device" for ttyS?
13.10 "Cannot create lockfile. Sorry"
13.11 "Device /dev/ttyS? is locked."
13.12 "/dev/ttyS?: Device or resource busy"
13.13 Troubleshooting Tools

14. Interrupt Problem Details

14.1 Types of interrupt problems
14.2 Symptoms of Mis-set or Conflicting Interrupts
14.3 Mis-set Interrupts
14.4 Interrupt Conflicts
14.5 Resolving Interrupt Problems

15. What Are UARTs? How Do They Affect Performance?

15.1 Introduction to UARTS
15.2 Two Types of UARTs
15.3 FIFOs
15.4 UART Model Numbers

16. Pinout and Signals

16.1 Pinout
16.2 Signals May Have No Fixed Meaning
16.3 Cabling Between Serial Ports
16.4 RTS/CTS and DTR/DSR Flow Control
16.4.1 The DTR and DSR Pins
16.5 Preventing a Port From Opening

17. Voltage Waveshapes

17.1 Voltage for a Bit
17.2 Voltage Sequence for a Byte
17.3 Parity Explained
17.4 Forming a Byte (Framing)
17.5 How "Asynchronous" is Synchronized

18. Other Serial Devices (not async EIA-232)

18.1 Successors to EIA-232
18.2 EIA-422-A (balanced) and EIA-423-A (unbalanced)
18.3 EIA-485
18.4 EIA-530
18.5 EIA-612/613
18.6 The Universal Serial Bus (USB)
18.7 Synchronization & Synchronous
18.7.1 Defining Asynchronous vs Synchronous
18.7.2 Synchronous Communication

19. Other Sources of Information

19.1 Books
19.2 Serial Software
19.3 Linux Documents
19.4 Usenet newsgroups:
19.5 Serial Mailing List
19.6 Internet

______________________________________________________________________

1. Introduction

This HOWTO covers basic info on the Serial Port and multiport serial
cards. Information specific to modems and text-terminals has been
moved to Modem-HOWTO and Text-Terminal-HOWTO. Info on getty (the
program that runs the login process or the like) has been also moved
to these HOWTOs since mgetty and uugetty are best for modems while
agetty is best for text-terminals. If you are dealing with a modem,
text terminal, or printer, then you may not need to consult this
HOWTO. But if you are using the serial port for some other device,
using a multiport serial card, trouble-shooting the serial port
itself, or want to understand more technical details of the serial
port, then you may want to use this HOWTO as well as some of the other
HOWTOs. (See ``Related HOWTO's'') This HOWTO lists info on various
multiport serial cards since they may be used for either modems or
text-terminals. This HOWTO addresses Linux running on Intel x86
hardware, although it might be valid for other architectures.

1.1. Copyright, Disclaimer, & Credits

1.1.1. Copyright

Please freely copy and distribute (sell or give away) this document in
any format. Forward any corrections and comments to the document
maintainer. You may create a derivative work and distribute it
provided that you:

1. Send your derivative work (in the most suitable format such as
sgml) to the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) or the like for
posting on the Internet. If not the LDP, then let the LDP know
where it is available. Except for a translation, send a copy to
the previous maintainer's url as shown in the latest version.

2. License the derivative work in the spirit of this license or use
GPL. Include a copyright notice and at least a pointer to the
license used.

3. Give due credit to previous authors and major contributors.

If you're considering making a derived work other than a translation,
it's requested that you discuss your plans with the current
maintainer.

1.1.2. Disclaimer

While I haven't intentionally tried to mislead you, there are likely a
number of errors in this document. Please let me know about them.
Since this is free documentation, it should be obvious that I cannot
be held legally responsible for any errors.

1.1.3. Trademarks.

Any brand names (starts with a capital letter) should be assumed to be
a trademark). Such trademarks belong to their respective owners.

1.1.4. Credits

Most of the original Serial-HOWTO was written by Greg Hankins.
gregh@cc.gatech.edu He also rewrote many contributions by others in
order to maintain continuity in the writing style and flow. He wrote:
"Thanks to everyone who has contributed or commented, the list of
people has gotten too long to list (somewhere over one hundred).
Special thanks to Ted Ts'o for answering questions about the serial
drivers. Approximately half of v2.00 was from Greg Hankins HOWTO and
the other half is by David Lawyer. Ted Ts'o has continued to be
helpful.

1.2. New Versions of this Serial-HOWTO

New versions of the Serial-HOWTO will be available to browse and/or
download at LDP mirror sites. For a list of mirror sites see:
<http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/mirrors.html>. Various formats are
available. If you only want to quickly check the date of the latest
version look at <http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Serial-HOWTO.html>
and compare it to this version: v2.08 June 2000 . New in this version
is: /proc/tty, fixed link to Gary's Encyclopedia.

1.3. Related HOWTO's re the Serial Port

Modems, Text-Terminals, some printers, and other peripherals often use
the serial port. Get these HOWTOs from the nearest mirror site as
explained above.

� Modem-HOWTO is about installing and configuring modems

� Printing-HOWTO has info on using a serial printer

� Serial-Programming-HOWTO helps you write C programs (or parts of
them) that read and write to the serial port and/or check/set its
state. A new version has been written by Vern Hoxie but not
submitted. A copy is at ``Internet''.

� Text-Terminal-HOWTO is about how they work, how to install
configure, and repair them. It includes a section on "Make a
Terminal the Console" which is useful for using a remote terminal
to control a server (via the serial port).

1.4. Feedback

Please send me any questions, comments, suggestions, or additional
material. I'm always eager to hear about what you think about this
HOWTO. I'm also always on the lookout for improvements! Tell me
exactly what you don't understand, or what could be clearer. You can
reach me via email at (David Lawyer).

1.5. What is a Serial Port?

The conventional serial port (not the newer USB port, or HSSI port) is
a very old I/O port. Almost all PC's have them. But Macs (Apple
Computer) after mid 1998 (with colored cases) only have the USB port.
The common specification is RS-232 (or EIA-232). The connector for
the serial port is often seen as one or two 9-pin connectors (in some
cases 25-pin) on the back of a PC. But the serial port is is more
than just that. It includes the associated electronics which must
produce signals conforming to the EIA-232 specification. See
``Voltage Waveshapes''. One pin is used to send out data bytes and
another to receive data bytes. Another pin is a common signal ground.
The other "useful" pins are used mainly for signalling purposes with a
steady negative voltage meaning "off" and a steady positive voltage
meaning "on".

The UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) chip does most
of the work. Today, the functionality of this chip is usually built
into another chip. See ``What Are UARTs?'' These have improved over
time and old models (several years old) are now obsolete.

The serial port was originally designed for connecting modems but it's
used to connect many other devices also such as mice, text-terminals,
some printers, etc. to a computer. You just plug these devices into
the serial port using the correct cable. Many internal modem cards
have a built-in serial port so when you install one inside your PC
it's as if you just installed another serial port in your PC.

2. How the Hardware Transfers Bytes

Below is an introduction to the topic, but for a more advance
treatment of it see ``FIFOs''.

2.1. Transmitting

Transmitting is sending bytes out of the serial port away from the
computer. Once you understand transmitting, receiving is easy to
understand since it's similar. The first explanation given here will
be grossly oversimplified. Then more detail will be added in later
explanations. When the computer wants to send a byte out the serial
port (to the external cable) the CPU sends the byte on the bus inside
the computer to the I/O address of the serial port. The serial port
takes the byte, and sends it out one bit at a time (a serial bit-
stream) on the transmit pin of the serial cable connector. For what a
bit (and byte) look like electrically see ``Voltage Waveshapes''.

Here's a replay of the above in a little more detail (but still very
incomplete). Most of the work at the serial port is done by the UART
chip (or the like). To transmit a byte, the serial device driver
program (running on the CPU) sends a byte to the serial port"s I/O
address. This byte gets into a 1-byte "transmit shift register" in
the serial port. From this shift register bits are taken from the
byte one-by-one and sent out bit-by-bit on the serial line. Then when
the last bit has been sent and the shift register needs another byte
to send it could just ask the CPU to send it another byte. Thus would
be simple but it would likely introduce delays since the CPU might not
be able to get the byte immediately. After all, the CPU is usually
doing other things besides just handling the serial port.

A way to eliminate such delays is to arrange things so that the CPU
gets the byte before the shift register needs it and stores it in a
serial port buffer (in hardware). Then when the shift register has
sent out its byte and needs a new byte immediately, the serial port
hardware just transfers the next byte from its own buffer to the shift
register. No need to call the CPU to fetch a new byte.

The size of this serial port buffer was originally only one byte, but
today it is usually 16 bytes (more in higher priced serial ports).
Now there is still the problem of keeping this buffer sufficiently
supplied with bytes so that when the shift register needs a byte to
transmit it will always find one there (unless there are no more bytes
to send). This is done by contacting the CPU using an interrupt.

First we'll explain the case of the old fashioned one-byte buffer,
since 16-byte buffers work similarly (but are more complex). When the
shift register grabs the byte out of the buffer and the buffer needs
another byte, it sends an interrupt to the CPU by putting a voltage on
a dedicated wire on the computer bus. Unless the CPU is doing
something very important, the interrupt forces it to stop what it was
doing and start running a program which will supply another byte to
the port's buffer. The purpose of this buffer is to keep an extra
byte (waiting to be sent) queued in hardware so that there will be no
gaps in the transmission of bytes out the serial port cable.

Once the CPU gets the interrupt, it will know who sent the interrupt
since there is a dedicated interrupt wire for each serial port (unless
interrupts are shared). Then the CPU will start running the serial
device driver which checks registers at I/0 addresses to find out what
has happened. It finds out that the serial's transmit buffer is empty
and waiting for another byte. So if there are more bytes to send, it
sends the next byte to the serial port's I/0 address. This next byte
should arrive when the previous byte is still in the transmit shift
register and is still being transmitted bit-by-bit.

In review, when a byte has been fully transmitted out the transmit
wire of the serial port and the shift register is now empty the
following 3 things happen almost simultaneously:

1. The next byte is moved from the transmit buffer into the transmit
shift register

2. The transmission of this new byte (bit-by-bit) begins

3. Another interrupt is issued to tell the device driver to send yet
another byte to the now empty transmit buffer

Thus we say that the serial port is interrupt driven. Each time the
serial port issues an interrupt, the CPU sends it another byte. Once
a byte has been sent to the transmit buffer by the CPU, then the CPU
is free to pursue some other activity until it gets the next
interrupt. The serial port transmits bits at a fixed rate which is
selected by the user (or an application program). It's sometimes
called the baud rate. The serial port also adds extra bits to each
byte (start, stop and perhaps parity bits) so there are often 10 bits
sent per byte. At a rate (also called speed) of 19,200 bits per
second (bps), there are thus 1,920 bytes/sec (and also 1,920
interrupts/sec).

Doing all this is a lot of work for the CPU. This is true for many
reasons. First, just sending one 8-bit byte at a time over a 32-bit
data bus (or even 64-bit) is not a very efficient use of bus width.
Also, there is a lot of overhead in handing each interrupt. When the
interrupt is received, the device driver only knows that something
caused an interrupt at the serial port but doesn't know that it's
because a character has been sent. The device driver has to make
various checks to find out what happened. The same interrupt could
mean that a character was received, one of the control lines changed
state, etc.

A major improvement has been the enlargement of the buffer size of the
serial port from 1-byte to 16-bytes. This means that when the CPU
gets an interrupt it gives the serial port up to 16 new bytes to
transmit. This is fewer interrupts to service but data must still be
transferred one byte at a time over a wide bus. The 16-byte buffer is
actually a FIFO (First In First Out) queue and is often called a FIFO.
See ``FIFOs'' for details about the FIFO along with a repeat of some
of the above info.

2.2. Receiving

Receiving bytes by a serial port is similar to sending them only it's
in the opposite direction. It's also interrupt driven. For the
obsolete type of serial port with 1-byte buffers, when a byte is fully
received from the external cable it goes into the 1-byte receive
buffer. Then the port gives the CPU an interrupt to tell it to pick
up that byte so that the serial port will have room for storing the
next byte which is currently being received. For newer serial ports
with 16-byte buffers, this interrupt (to fetch the bytes) may be sent
after 14 bytes are in the receive buffer. The CPU then stops what it
was doing, runs the interrupt service routine, and picks up 14 to 16
bytes from the port. For an interrupt sent when the 14th byte has
been received, there could be 16 bytes to get if 2 more bytes have
arrived since the interrupt. But if 3 more bytes should arrive
(instead of 2), then the 16-byte buffer will overrun. It also may
pick up less than 14 bytes by setting it that way or due to timeouts.
See ``FIFOs'' for more details.

2.3. The Large Serial Buffers

We've talked about small 16-byte serial port hardware buffers but
there are also much larger buffers in main memory. When the CPU takes
some bytes out of the receive buffer of the hardware, it puts them
into a much larger (say 8k-byte) receive buffer in main memory. Then
a program that is getting bytes from the serial port takes the bytes
it's receiving out of that large buffer (using a "read" statement in
the program). A similar situation exists for bytes that are to be
transmitted. When the CPU needs to fetch some bytes to be transmitted
it takes them out of a large (8k-byte) transmit buffer in main memory
and puts them into the small 16-byte transmit buffer in the hardware.

3. Serial Port Basics

You don't have to understand the basics to use the serial port But
understanding it may help to determine what is wrong if you run into
problems. This section not only presents new topics but also repeats
some of what was said in the previous section ``How the Hardware
Transfers Bytes'' but in greater detail.

3.1. What is a Serial Port ?

3.1.1. Intro to Serial

The serial port is an I/O (Input/Output) device.

An I/O device is just a way to get data into and out of a computer.
There are many types of I/O devices such as serial ports, parallel
ports, disk drive controllers, ethernet boards, universal serial
buses, etc. Most PC's have one or two serial ports. Each has a 9-pin
connector (sometimes 25-pin) on the back of the computer. Computer
programs can send data (bytes) to the transmit pin (output) and
receive bytes from the receive pin (input). The other pins are for
control purposes and ground.

The serial port is much more than just a connector. It converts the
data from parallel to serial and changes the electrical representation
of the data. Inside the computer, data bits flow in parallel (using
many wires at the same time). Serial flow is a stream of bits over a
single wire (such as on the transmit or receive pin of the serial
connector). For the serial port to create such a flow, it must
convert data from parallel (inside the computer) to serial on the
transmit pin (and conversely).
Most of the electronics of the serial port is found in a computer chip
(or a section of a chip) known as a UART. For more details on UARTs
see the section ``What Are UARTs? How Do They Affect Performance?''.
But you may want to finish this section first so that you will
hopefully understand how the UART fits into the overall scheme of
things.

3.1.2. Pins and Wires

Old PC's used 25 pin connectors but only about 9 pins were actually
used so today most connectors are only 9-pin. Each of the 9 pins
usually connects to a wire. Besides the two wires used for
transmitting and receiving data, another pin (wire) is signal ground.
The voltage on any wire is measured with respect to this ground. Thus
the minimum number of wires to use for 2-way transmission of data is
3. Except that it has been known to work with no signal ground wire
but with degraded performance and sometimes with errors.

There are still more wires which are for control purposes (signalling)
only and not for sending bytes. All of these signals could have been
shared on a single wire, but instead, there is a separate dedicated
wire for every type of signal. Some (or all) of these control wires
are called "modem control lines". Modem control wires are either in
the asserted state (on) of +12 volts or in the negated state (off) of
-12 volts. One of these wires is to signal the computer to stop
sending bytes out the serial port cable. Conversely, another wire
signals the device attached to the serial port to stop sending bytes
to the computer. If the attached device is a modem, other wires may
tell the modem to hang up the telephone line or tell the computer that
a connection has been made or that the telephone line is ringing
(someone is attempting to call in). See section ``Pinout and
Signals'' for more details.

3.1.3. RS-232 or EIA-232, etc.

The serial port (not the USB) is usually a RS-232-C, EIA-232-D, or
EIA-232-E. These three are almost the same thing. The original RS
(Recommended Standard) prefix became EIA (Electronics Industries
Association) and later EIA/TIA after EIA merged with TIA
(Telecommunications Industries Association). The EIA-232 spec
provides also for synchronous (sync) communication but the hardware to
support sync is almost always missing on PC's. The RS designation is
obsolete but is still widely used. EIA will be used in this howto.
Some documents use the full EIA/TIA designation. For info on other
(non-EIA-232) serial ports see the section ``Other Serial Devices (not
async EIA-232)''

3.2. IO Address & IRQ

Since the computer needs to communicate with each serial port, the
operating system must know that each serial port exists and where it
is (its I/O address). It also needs to know which wire (IRQ number)
the serial port must use to request service from the computer's CPU.
It requests service by sending an interrupt on this wire. Thus every
serial port device must store in its non-volatile memory both its I/O
address and its Interrupt ReQuest number: IRQ. See ``Interrupts''.
For the PCI bus it doesn't work exactly this way since the PCI bus has
its own system of interrupts. But since the PCI-aware BIOS sets up
chips to map these PCI interrupts to IRQs, it seemingly behaves just
as described above except that sharing of interrupts is allowed (2 or
more devices may use the same IRQ number).
I/O addresses are not the same as memory addresses. When an I/O
addresses is put onto the computer's address bus, another wire is
energized. This both tells main memory to ignore the address and
tells all devices which have I/O addresses (such as the serial port)
to listen to the address to see if it matches the device's. If the
address matches, then the I/O device reads the data on the data bus.

3.3. Names: ttyS0, ttyS1, etc.

The serial ports are named ttyS0, ttyS1, etc. (and usually correspond
respectively to COM1, COM2, etc. in DOS/Windows). The /dev directory
has a special file for each port. Type "ls /dev/ttyS*" to see them.
Just because there may be (for example) a ttyS3 file, doesn't
necessarily mean that there exists a physical serial port there.

Which one of these names (ttyS0, ttyS1, etc.) refers to which physical
serial port is determined as follows. The serial driver (software)
maintains a table showing which I/O address corresponds to which ttyS.
This mapping of names (such as ttyS1) to I/O addresses (and IRQ's) may
be both set and viewed by the "setserial" command. See ``What is
Setserial''. This does not set the I/O address and IRQ in the
hardware itself (which is set by jumpers or by plug-and-play
software). Thus what physical port corresponds to say ttyS1 depends
both on what the serial driver thinks (per setserial) and what is set
in the hardware. If a mistake has been made, the physical port may
not correspond to any name (such as ttyS2) and thus it can't be used.
See ``Serial Port Devices /dev/ttyS2, etc.'' for more details>

3.4. Interrupts

When the serial port receives a number of bytes (may be set to 1, 4,
8, or 14) into its FIFO buffer, it signals the CPU to fetch them by
sending an electrical signal known as an interrupt on a certain wire
normally used only by that port. Thus the FIFO waits for a number of
bytes and then issues an interrupt.

However, this interrupt will also be sent if there is an unexpected
delay while waiting for the next byte to arrive (known as a timeout).
Thus if the bytes are being received slowly (such as someone typing on
a terminal keyboard) there may be an interrupt issued for every byte
received. For some UART chips the rule is like this: If 4 bytes in a
row could have been received, but none of these 4 show up, then the
port gives up waiting for more bytes and issues an interrupt to fetch
the bytes currently in the FIFO. Of course, if the FIFO is empty, no
interrupt will be issued.

Each interrupt conductor (inside the computer) has a number (IRQ) and
the serial port must know which conductor to use to signal on. For
example, ttyS0 normally uses IRQ number 4 known as IRQ4 (or IRQ 4). A
list of them and more will be found in "man setserial" (search for
"Configuring Serial Ports"). Interrupts are issued whenever the
serial port needs to get the CPU's attention. It's important to do
this in a timely manner since the buffer inside the serial port can
hold only 16 (1 in old serial ports) incoming bytes. If the CPU fails
to remove such received bytes promptly, then there will not be any
space left for any more incoming bytes and the small buffer may
overflow (overrun) resulting in a loss of data bytes. There is no
``Flow Control'' to prevent this.

Interrupts are also issued when the serial port has just sent out all
16 of its bytes from its small transmit buffer out the external cable.
It then has space for 16 more outgoing bytes. The interrupt is to
notify the CPU of that fact so that it may put more bytes in the small
transmit buffer to be transmitted. Also, when a modem control line
changes state an interrupt is issued.

The buffers mentioned above are all hardware buffers. The serial port
also has large buffers in main memory. This will be explained later

Interrupts convey a lot of information but only indirectly. The
interrupt itself just tells a chip called the interrupt controller
that a certain serial port needs attention. The interrupt controller
then signals the CPU. The CPU runs a special program to service the
serial port. That program is called an interrupt service routine
(part of the serial driver software). It tries to find out what has
happened at the serial port and then deals with the problem such a
transferring bytes from (or to) the serial port's hardware buffer.
This program can easily find out what has happened since the serial
port has registers at IO addresses known to the the serial driver
software. These registers contain status information about the serial
port. The software reads these registers and by inspecting the
contents, finds out what has happened and takes appropriate action.

3.5. Data Flow (Speeds)

Data (bytes representing letters, pictures, etc.) flows into and out
of your serial port. Flow rates (such as 56k (56000) bits/sec) are
(incorrectly) called "speed". But almost everyone says "speed"
instead of "flow rate".

It's important to understand that the average speed is often less than
the specified speed. Waits (or idle time) result in a lower average
speed. These waits may include long waits of perhaps a second due to
``Flow Control''. At the other extreme there may be very short waits
(idle time) of several micro-seconds between bytes. If the device on
the serial port (such as a modem) can't accept the full serial port
speed, then the average speed must be reduced.

3.6. Flow Control

Flow control means the ability to stop the flow of bytes in a wire.
It also includes provisions to restart the flow without any loss of
bytes. Flow control is needed for modems to allow a jump in
instantaneous flow rates.

3.6.1. Example of Flow Control

For example, consider the case where you connect a 36.6k external
modem via a short cable to your serial port. The modem sends and
receives bytes over the phone line at 36.6k bits per second (bps).
It's not doing any data compression or error correction. You have set
the serial port speed to 115,200 bits/sec (bps), and you are sending
data from your computer to the phone line. Then the flow from the
your computer to your modem over the short cable is at 115.2k bps.
However the flow from your modem out the phone line is only 33.6k bps.
Since a faster flow (115.2k) is going into your modem than is coming
out of it, the modem is storing the excess flow (115.2k -33.6k = 81.6k
bps) in one of its buffers. This buffer would eventually overrun (run
out of free storage space) unless the 115.2k flow is stopped.

But now flow control comes to the rescue. When the modem's buffer is
almost full, the modem sends a stop signal to the serial port. The
serial port passes on the stop signal on to the device driver and the
115.2k bps flow is halted. Then the modem continues to send out data
at 33.6k bps drawing on the data it previous accumulated in its
buffer. Since nothing is coming into the buffer, the level of bytes
in it starts to drop. When almost no bytes are left in the buffer,
the modem sends a start signal to the serial port and the 115.2k flow
from the computer to the modem resumes. In effect, flow control
creates an average flow rate in the short cable (in this case 33.6k)
which is significantly less than the "on" flow rate of 115.2k bps.
This is "start-stop" flow control.

The above is a simple example of flow control for flow from the
computer to a modem , but there is also flow control which is used for
the opposite direction of flow: from a modem (or other device) to a
computer. Each direction of flow involve 3 buffers: 1. in the modem
2. in the UART chip (called FIFOs) 3. in main memory managed by the
serial driver. Flow control protects certain buffers from
overflowing. The small UART FIFO buffers are not protected in this
way but rely instead on a fast response to the interrupts they issue.
FIFO stand for "First In, First Out" which is the way it handles
bytes. All the 3 buffers use the FIFO rule but only one of them also
uses it as a name. This is the essence of flow control but there are
still some more details.

3.6.2. Symptoms of No Flow Control

Understanding flow-control theory can be of practical use. The
symptom of no flow control is chunks of data missing from files sent
without the benefit of flow control. This is because when overflow
happens, it's usually more than just a few bytes that overflow and are
lost. Often hundreds or even thousands of bytes get lost, and all in
contiguous chunks.

3.6.3. Hardware vs. Software Flow Control

If feasible it's best to use "hardware" flow control that uses two
dedicated "modem control" wires to send the "stop" and "start"
signals.

Software flow control uses the main receive and transmit wires to send
the start and stop signals. It uses the ASCII control characters DC1
(start) and DC3 (stop) for this purpose. They are just inserted into
the regular stream of data. Software flow control is not only slower
in reacting but also does not allow the sending of binary data unless
special precautions are taken. Since binary data will likely contain
DC1 and DC3, special means must be taken to distinguish between a DC3
that means a flow control stop and a DC3 that is part of the binary
code. Likewise for DC1.

3.7. Data Flow Path; Buffers

Although much has been explained about this including flow control, a
pair of 16-byte FIFO buffers (in the hardware), and a pair of larger
buffers inside a device connected to the serial port there is still
another pair of buffers. These are large buffers (perhaps 8k) in main
memory also known as serial port buffers. When an application program
sends bytes to the serial port they first get stashed in the the
transmit serial port buffer in main memory. The pair consists of both
this transmit buffer and a receive buffer for the opposite direction
of byte-flow.

The serial device driver takes out say 16 bytes from this transmit
buffer, one byte at a time and puts them into the 16-byte transmit
buffer in the serial hardware for transmission. Once in that transmit
buffer, there is no way to stop them from being transmitted. They are
then transmitted to the device connected to the serial port which also
has a fair sized (say 1k) buffer. When the device driver (on orders
from flow control) stops the flow of outgoing bytes from the computer,
what it actually stops is the flow of outgoing bytes from the large
transmit buffer in main memory. Even after this has happened and the
flow to the device connected to the serial port has stopped, an
application program may keep sending bytes to the 8k transmit buffer
until it becomes fill.

When it gets fill, the application program can't send any more bytes
to it (a "write" statement in a C_program blocks) and the application
program temporarily stops running and waits until some buffer space
becomes available. Thus a flow control "stop" is ultimately able to
stop the program that is sending the bytes. Even though this program
stops, the computer does not necessarily stop computing. It may
switch to running other processes while it's waiting at a flow control
stop. The above was a little oversimplified since there is another
alternative of having the application program itself do something else
while it is waiting to "write".

3.8. Complex Flow Control Example

For many situations, there is a transmit path involving several links,
each with its own flow control. For example, I type at a text-
terminal connected to a PC with a modem to access a BBS. For this I
use the application program "minicom" which deals with 2 serial ports:
one connected to a modem and another connected to the text-terminal.
What I type at the text terminal goes into the first serial port to
minicom, then from minicom out the second serial port to the modem,
and then onto the telephone line to the BBS. The text-terminal has a
limit to the speed at which bytes can be displayed on its screen and
issues a flow control "stop" from time to time to slow down the flow.
What happens when such a "stop" is issued? Let's consider a case
where the "stop" is long enough to get thru to the BBS and stop the
program at the BBS which is sending out the bytes.

Let's trace out the flow of this "stop" (which may be "hardware" on
some links and "software" on others). First, suppose I'm "capturing"
a long file from the BBS which is being sent simultaneously to both my
text-terminal and a to file on my hard-disk. The bytes are coming in
faster than the terminal can handle them so it sends a "stop" out its
serial port to the first serial port on my PC. The device driver
detects it and stops sending bytes from the 8k serial buffer (in main
memory) to the terminal. Now minicom still keeps sending out bytes
for the terminal into this 8k buffer.

When this 8k transmit buffer (on the first serial port) is full,
minicom must stop writing to it. Minicom stops and waits. But this
also causes minicom to stop reading from the 8k receive buffer on the
2nd serial port connected to the modem. Flow from the modem continues
until this 8k buffer too fills up and sends a different "stop" to the
modem. Now the modem's buffer ceases to send to the serial port and
also fills up. The modem (assuming error correction is enabled) sends
a "stop signal" to the other modem at the BBS. This modem stops
sending bytes out of its buffer and when its buffer gets fill, another
stop signal is sent to the serial port of the BBS. At the BBS, the
8-k (or whatever) buffer fills up and the program at the BBS can't
write to it anymore and thus temporarily halts.

Thus a stop signal from a text terminal has halted a programs on a BBS
computer. What a complex sequence of events! Note that the stop
signal passed thru 4 serial ports, 2 modems, and one application
program (minicom). Each serial port has 2 buffers (in one direction
of flow): the 8k one and the hardware 16-byte one. The application
program may have a buffer in its C_code. This adds up to 11 different
buffers the data is passing thru. Note that the small serial hardware
buffers do not participate directly in flow control.

If the terminal speed limitation is the bottleneck in the flow from
the BBS to the terminal, then its flow control "stop" is actually
stopping the program that is sending from the BBS as explained above.
But you may ask: How can a "stop" last so long that 11 buffers (some
of them large) all get filled up? It can actually happen this way if
all the buffers were near their upper limits when the terminal sent
out the "stop".

But if you were to run a simulation on it you would discover that it's
usually more complicated than this. At an instant of time some links
are flowing and others are stopped (due to flow control). A "stop"
from the terminal seldom propagates back to the BBS neatly as
described above. It may take a few "stops" from the terminal to
result in one "stop" at the BBS. To understand what is going on you
really need to observe a simulation which can be done for a simple
case with coins on a table. Use only a few buffers and set the upper
level for each buffer at only a few coins.

Does one really need to understand all this? Well, understanding this
explained to me why capturing text from a BBS was loosing text. The
situation was exactly the above example but modem-to-modem flow
control was disabled. Chunks of captured text that were supposed to
also get to my hard-disk never got there because of an overflow at my
modem buffer due to flow control "stops" from the terminal. Even
though the BBS had a flow path to the hard-disk without bottlenecks,
the overflow due to the terminal happened on this path and chunks of
text were lost and never even made it to the hard-disk. Note that the
flow to the hard-disk passed thru my modem and since the overflow
happened there, bytes intended for the hard-disk were lost.

3.9. Serial Software: Device Driver Module

The device driver for the serial port is the software that operates
the serial port. It is now provided as a serial module. This module
will normally get loaded automatically if it's needed. The kernel 2.2
+ will do this. In earlier kernels, you had to have kerneld running
in order to do auto-load modules on demand. Otherwise the serial
module needed to be explicitly listed in /etc/modules. Before modules
became popular with Linux, the serial driver was usually built into
the kernel. If it's still built into the kernel (you might have
selected this when you compiled the kernel) don't let the serial
module load. If you do and wind up with two serial drivers, it's
reported that you can't use the serial ports and get an "I/O error" if
an attempt is made to open them.

When the serial module is loaded it displays a message on the screen
about the existing serial ports (often showing a wrong IRQ). But once
the module is used by setserial to tell the device driver the
(hopefully) correct IRQ then you should see a second display similar
to the first but with the correct IRQ, etc. See ``What is Setserial''
for more info on setserial. )

One may modify the driver by editing the kernel source code. Much of
the serial driver is found in the file serial.c. For details
regarding writing of programs for the serial port see Serial-
Programming-HOWTO (currently being revised by Vern Hoxie).

4. Is the Serial Port Obsolete?

4.1. Introduction

The answer is yes, but ... The serial port is somewhat obsolete but
it's still needed, especially for Linux. The serial port has many
shortcomings but almost all new PC's seem to come with them them.
Linux supports ordinary telephone modems only if they work thru a
serial port.

The serial port must pass data between the computer and the external
cable. Thus it has two interfaces and both of these interfaces are
slow. First we'll consider the interface via external cable to the
outside world.

4.2. EIA-232 Cable Is Low Speed & Short Distance

The conventional EIA-232 serial port is inherently low speed and is
severely limited in distance. Ads often read "high speed" but it can
only work at "high speed" over very short distances such as to a modem
located right next to the computer. Compared to a network card, even
this "high speed" is low speed. All of the serial cable wires use a
common ground return wire so that twisted-pair technology (needed for
high speeds) can't be used without additional hardware. More modern
interfaces for serial ports exist but they are not standard on PC's
like the EIA-232 is. See ``Successors to EIA-232''. Some multiport
serial cards support them.

It is somewhat tragic that the RS-232 standard from 1969 did not use
twisted pair technology which could operate about a hundred times
faster. Twisted pairs have been used in telephone cables since the
late 1800's. In 1888 (over 110 years ago) the "Cable Conference"
reported its support of twisted-pair (for telephone systems) and
pointed out its advantages. But over 80 years after this approval by
the "Cable Conference", RS-232 failed to utilize it. Since RS-232
was originally designed for connecting a terminal to a low speed modem
located nearby, the need for high speed and longer distance
transmission was apparently not recognized.

4.3. Inefficient Interface to the Computer

To communicate with the computer, any I/O device needs to have an
address so that the computer can write to it and read from it. For
this purpose many I/O devices (such as serial ports) use a special
type of address known as an I/O addresses (sometimes called an I/O
port). It's actually a range of addresses and the lower address in
this range is the base address. If someone only says (or writes)
"address" it likely really means "base address"

Instead of using I/O, addresses some I/O devices read and write
directly from/to main memory. This provides more bandwidth since the
conventional serial I/O system only moves a byte at a time. There are
various ways to read/write directly to main memory. One way is called
shared memory I/O (where the shared memory is usually on the same card
as the I/O device). Other methods are DMA (direct memory access) on
the ISA bus and what is about the same as DMA (only much faster):
"bus mastering" on the PCI bus. These methods are a lot faster than
those used for the serial port. Thus the conventional serial port
with its interrupt driven (every 14 bytes) interface and single bytes
transfers on a bus which could accommodate 4 (or 8) bytes at a time is
not suited for very high speed I/O.

5. Multiport Serial Boards/Cards/Adapters

5.1. Intro to Multiport Serial

Multiport serial cards install in a slot in a PC on the ISA or PCI
bus. Instead of being called "... cards" they are also called "...
adapters" or "... boards". Each such card provides you with many
serial ports. Today they are commonly used for the control of
external devices (including automation for both industry and the
home). They can connect to computer servers for the purpose of
monitoring/controlling the server from a remote location. They were
once mainly used for connecting up many terminals and/or modems to
serial ports. They are still used this way but a modem used with it
has the same limitation of ordinary modems: It can't send at over
33.6k even if it is a 56k modem.

Thus if someone dials in to you (reaches your multiport serial card
from a modem plugged into the card) they will not be able to go above
33.6k in either direction, even if they use a 56k modem. To go above
33.6k for dial-in requires that you have a digital connection to the
telephone line. The serial port is no longer used for this case.
Thus serial multiport cards are now obsolete for use by ISPs or anyone
that needs to allow others to dial-in to them at 56k (over 33.6k).
See Modem-HOWTO: Modem Pools, Digital Modems.

Each multiport card has a number of external connecters (DB-25 or RJ45
(telephone-like)) so that one may connect up a number of devices
(modems, terminals, etc.). Each such physical device would then be
connected to its own serial port. Since the space on the external-
facing part of the card is limited there is often not enough room for
all the serial port connectors. To solve this problem, the connectors
may be on the ends of cables which come out (externally) from the card
(octopus cable). These connectors may also be on a little box which
is connected by a cable to the multiport card.

Dumb ones are not too much different than ordinary serial ports. They
are interrupt driven and the CPU of the computer does most all the
work servicing them. They usually have a system of sharing a single
interrupt for all the ports. This doesn't decrease the load on the
CPU since the single interrupt will be sent to the CPU each time any
of the ports needs servicing. Such devices usually require special
drivers that you must put into the kernel or activate by modifying
source code.

Smart boards may use ordinary UARTs but handle most interrupts from
the UARTs internally within the board. This frees the CPU from the
burden of handling all these interrupts. The board may save up bytes
in its large internal FIFOs and transfer perhaps 1k bytes at a time to
the serial buffer in main memory. It may use the full bus width of 32
bits for making data transfers to main memory (instead of transferring
only 8-bit bytes like dumb serial cards do). Not all "smart" boards
are equally efficient. Many boards today are Plug-and-Play.

For a smart board to work, a special driver for it must be used.
Sometimes this driver is built into the kernel source code or supplied
as a module. Even in such cases, you must still do something to
activate it. This includes selecting it when you compile the kernel
(or making sure that a pre-compiled kernel has done this). The "make
config" or "make menuconf" commands may display an option for this.
In some cases there is a special module to load or certain parameters
to pass to the kernel (via lilo's append command). The board's
manufacturer should have info on this on their website.
Unfortunately, info for old boards is sometimes not there but might be
found somewhere else on the Internet (including discussion groups).

5.2. Making "devices" in the /dev directory

The serial ports your multiport board uses depends on what kind of
board you have. Some of these may be listed in detail in rc.serial or
in 0setserial. These files may be included in a >setserial or serial
package. I highly recommend getting the latest version of setserial
if you are trying to use multiport boards. You will probably need to
create these devices. Either use the mknod command, or the MAKEDEV
script. Devices (in the /dev directory) for serial ports are made by
adding ``64 + port number''. So, if you wanted to create devices for
ttyS17, you would type:

linux# mknod -m 666 /dev/ttyS17 c 4 81

Note the "major" number is always 4 for ttyS devices (and 5 for the
obsolete cua devices). Also ``64 + 17 = 81''. Using the MAKEDEV
script, you would type:

linux# cd /dev
linux# ./MAKEDEV ttyS17

Besides the listing of various brands of multiports found in this
HOWTO there is Gary's Encyclopedia - Serial Cards
<http://members.aa.net/~swear/pedia/serialcards.html>. It's not as
complete, but may have some different links.

5.3. Standard PC Serial Cards

In olden days PCs used to come with a serial card installed. Later on
the serial function was put on the hard-drive interface card. Today
one or two serial ports are usually built into the motherboard. But
one may still buy the old PC serial cards if they need 1-4 more serial
ports. These are for ttyS0-ttyS3 (COM1 - COM4). They can be used to
connect external serial devices (modems, serial mice, etc...). Only a
tiny percentage of retail computer stores carry such cards. But one
can purchase them on the Internet. Before getting a PCI one, make
sure Linux supports it.

Here's a list of a few popular brands:

� Byte Runner (may order directly, shows prices)
<http://www.byterunner.com>

� SIIG <http://www.siig.com/io>

� Dolphin <http://www.dolphinfast.com/sersol/>

Note: due to address conflicts, you may not be able to use COM4 and
IBM8514 video card (or some others) simultaneously. See ``Avoiding IO
Address Conflicts with Certain Video Boards''

5.4. Dumb Multiport Serial Boards (with standard UART chips)

They are also called "serial adapters". They often have a special
method of sharing interrupts which requires that you compile support
for them into the kernel.

* => The file that ran setserial in Debian shows some details of
configuring # => See note below for this board

� AST FourPort and clones (4 ports) * #

� Accent Async-4 (4 ports) *

� Arnet Multiport-8 (8 ports)

� Bell Technologies HUB6 (6 ports)

� Boca BB-1004 (4 ports), BB-1008 (8 ports), BB-2016 (16 ports; See
the mini-howto) * #

� Boca IOAT66 or? ATIO66 (6 ports, Linux doesn't support its IRQ
sharing ?? Uses odd-ball 10-cond RJ45-like connectors)

� Boca 2by4 (4 serial ports, 2 parallel ports)

� Byte Runner <http://www.byterunner.com>

� Computone ValuePort V4-ISA (AST FourPort compatible) *

� Digi PC/8 (8 ports) #

� Dolphin <http://www.dolphinfast.com/sersol/>

� Globetek <http://www.globetek.com/>

� GTEK BBS-550 (8 ports; See the mini-howto)

� Hayes ESP (after kernel 2.1.15)

� HUB-6 See Bell Technologies.

� Longshine LCS-8880, Longshine LCS-8880+ (AST FourPort compatible) *

� Moxa C104, Moxa C104+ (AST FourPort compatible) *

� NI-SERIAL
<http://digital.natinst.com/manuals.nsf/web%2Fbyproductcurrent?OpenView&Start=1&Count=500&Expand=15.1#15.1>
by National Instruments

� PC-COMM (4 ports)

� Sealevel Systems <http://www.sealevel.com> COMM-2 (2 ports), COMM-4
(4 ports) and COMM-8 (8 ports)

� SIIG I/O Expander 2S IO1812 (4 ports) #

� STB-4COM (4 ports)

� Twincom ACI/550

� Usenet Serial Board II (4 ports) *

In general, Linux will support any serial board which uses a 8250,
16450, 16550, 16550A, 16650, etc. UART. See the latest man page for
"setserial" for a more complete list.

Notes:

AST Fourport: You might need to specify skip_test in rc.serial.

BB-1004 and BB-1008 do not support DCD and RI lines, and thus are not
usable for dialin modems. They will work fine for all other purposes.

Digi PC/8 Interrupt Status Register is at 0x140.

SIIG IO1812 manual for the listing for COM5-COM8 is wrong. They
should be COM5=0x250, COM6=0x258, COM7=0x260, and COM8=0x268.

5.5. Intelligent Multiport Serial Boards

Make sure that a Linux-compatible driver is available and read the
information that comes with it. These boards use special devices (in
the /dev directory), and not the standard ones. This information
varies depending on your hardware. If you have updated info which
should be shown here please email it to me.

Names of Linux driver modules are *.o but these may not work for all
models shown. Also, parameters (such as the io and irq often need to
be given to the module so you need to find instructions on this
(possibly in the source code tree).

There are many different brands, each of which often offers many
different cards. No attempt is currently being made to list the cards
here (and many listed may be obsolete). So this list is a hodgepodge
of both obsolete and the latest multiport brands/cards. Contact
information has been removed if it's available from the webpage.
Driver information should also be available from the same webpage.
Where there is no webpage, the cards are likely obsolete. If you
would like to put together a more complete list, let me know.

� Chase Research (UK based, ISA/PCI cards)
webpage: <www.chaser.com>
driver status: for 2.2 kernel. Supported by Chase.

� Comtrol RocketPort (36MHz ASIC; 4, 8, 16, 32, up to 128 ports)
webpage: http://www.comtrol.com
driver status: supported by Comtrol. rocket.o
driver location: ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages/comtrol

� Computone IntelliPort II (ISA, PCI and EISA busses up to 64 ports)
webpage: <http://www.computone.com>
driver location:
<ftp://ftp.computone.com/PUB/Products/IntelliPortII/Linux/>, patch
at <http://www.wittsend.com/computone/linux-2.2.10-ctone.patch.gz>
mailing list: <mailto:majordomo@lazuli.wittsend.com> with
"subscribe linux-computone" in body
note: Old ATvantage and Intelliport cards are not supported by
Computone

� Connecttech
website: <http://www.connecttech.com/porducts/products.html>
driver location: <ftp://ftp.connecttech.com/pub/linux/>

� Cyclades
Cyclom-Y (Cirrus Logic CD1400 UARTs; 8 - 32 ports),
Cyclom-Z (MIPS R3000; 8 - 64 ports)
website: <http://www.cyclades.com/products.html>
driver status: supported by Cyclades
driver location: ftp://ftp.cyclades.com/pub/cyclades and included
in Linux kernel since version 1.1.75: cyclades.o

� Decision PCCOM8 (8 ports)
contact: <mailto:info@cendio.se>
website: none (defunct) driver location:
ftp://ftp.signum.se/pub/pccom8

� Digi PC/Xi (12.5MHz 80186; 4, 8, or 16 ports),
PC/Xe (12.5/16MHz 80186; 2, 4, or 8 ports),
PC/Xr (16MHz IDT3041; 4 or 8 ports),
PC/Xem (20MHz IDT3051; 8 - 64 ports)
website: <http://www.dgii.com>
driver status: supported by Digi
driver location: ftp://ftp.dgii.com/drivers/linux and included in
Linux kernel since version 2.0. epca.o

� Digi COM/Xi (10MHz 80188; 4 or 8 ports)
contact: Simon Park, si@wimpol.demon.co.uk
driver status: ?
note: Simon is often away from email for months at a time due to
his job. Mark Hatle, <mailto:fray@krypton.mankato.msus.edu> has
graciously volunteered to make the driver available if you need it.
Mark is not maintaining or supporting the driver.

� Equinox SuperSerial Technology (30MHz ASIC; 2 - 128 ports)
website: http://www.equinox.com
driver status: supported by Equinox
driver location: ftp://ftp.equinox.com/library/sst

� Globetek
website: <http://www.globetek.com/products.shtml>
driver location:
<http://www.globetek.com/media/files/linux.tar.gz>

� GTEK Cyclone (16C654 UARTs; 6, 16 and 32 ports),
SmartCard (24MHz Dallas DS80C320; 8 ports),
BlackBoard-8A (16C654 UARTs; 8 ports),
PCSS (15/24MHz 8032; 8 ports)
website: http://www.gtek.com
driver status: supported by GTEK
driver location: ftp://ftp.gtek.com/pub

� Hayes ESP (COM-bic; 1 - 8 ports)
website: http://www.nyx.net/~arobinso
driver status: Supported by Linux kernel (1998) since v. 2.1.15.
esp.o. Setserial 2.15+ supports. Also supported by author
driver location: http://www.nyx.net/~arobinso

� Intelligent Serial Interface by Multi-Tech Systems
PCI: 4 or 8 port. ISA 8 port. DTE speed 460.8k
webpage: <http://www.multitech.com/products/>

� Maxpeed SS (Toshiba; 4, 8 and 16 ports)
website: http://www.maxpeed.com
driver status: supported by Maxpeed
driver location: ftp://maxpeed.com/pub/ss

� Microgate SyncLink ISA and PCI high speed multiprotocol serial.
Intended for synchronous HDLC.
website: <http://ww/microgate.com/products/sllinux/hdlcapi.htm>
driver status: supported by Microgate: synclink.o

� Moxa C218 (12MHz 80286; 8 ports),
Moxa C320 (40MHz TMS320; 8 - 32 ports)
website: http://www.moxa.com
driver status: supported by Moxa
driver locations:
<http://www.moxa.com/support/download/download.php3>>
<ftp://ftp.moxa.com/drivers/linux> (also from Taiwan at
www.moxa.com.tw/...) where ... is the same as above)

� SDL RISCom/8 (Cirrus Logic CD180; 8 ports)
website: http://www.sdlcomm.com
driver status: supported by SDL
driver location: ftp://ftp.sdlcomm.com/pub/drivers

� Specialix SX (25MHz T225; 8? - 32 ports),
SIO/XIO (20 MHz Zilog Z280; 4 - 32 ports)
webpage: <www.specialix.com/products/io/serialio.htm>
driver status: Supported by Specialix
driver location: <http://www.BitWizard.nl/specialix/>
old driver location:
<ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/patches/serial>

� Stallion EasyIO-4 (4 ports), EasyIO-8 (8 ports), and
EasyConnection (8 - 32 ports) - each with Cirrus Logic CD1400
UARTs,
Stallion (8MHz 80186 CPU; 8 or 16 ports),
Brumby (10/12 MHz 80186 CPU; 4, 8 or 16 ports),
ONboard (16MHz 80186 CPU; 4, 8, 12, 16 or 32 ports),
EasyConnection 8/64 (25MHz 80186 CPU; 8 - 64 ports)
contact: sales@stallion.com or http://www.stallion.com
driver status: supported by Stallion
driver location: ftp://ftp.stallion.com/drivers/ata5/Linux and
included in linux kernel since 1.3.27

� System Base website: <http://www.sysbas.com/>

A review of Comtrol, Cyclades, Digi, and Stallion products was printed
in the June 1995 issue of the Linux Journal. The article is available
at http://www.ssc.com/lj/issue14.

5.6. Unsupported Multiport Boards

The following boards don't mention any Linux support as of 1 Jan.
2000. Let me know if this changes.

� Aurora (PCI only) <www.auroratech.com>

6. Configuring the Serial Port

6.1. PCI Bus Support Underway

The kernel 2.2 serial driver contains no special support for the PCI
bus. But kernels 2.3 and 2.4 will eventually support some PCI serial
cards (and modem cards). Many PCI cards need special support in the
driver. The driver will read the id number digitally stored on the
card to determine how (or if) to support the card. If you have a PCI
card which you are convinced is not a winmodem but it will not work,
you can help in attempting to create a driver for it. To do this
you'll need to contact the maintainer of the serial driver, Theodore
(Ted) Y. Ts'o. But first check out the modem list site
<http://www.o2.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html> for the latest info on PCI
modems and related topic.

You will need to email Ted Ts'o a copy of the output of "lspci -vv"
with full information about the model and manufacturer of the PCI
modem (or serial port). Then he will try to point you to a test
driver which might work for it. You will then need to get it, compile
it and possibly recompile your kernel. Then you will test the driver
to see if it works OK for you and report the results to Ted Ts'o. If
you are willing to do all the above (and this is the latest version of
this HOWTO) then email the needed info to him at:
<mailto:tytso@mit.edu>.

PCI modems are not well standardized. Some use main memory for
communication with the PC. It you see 8-digit hexadecimal addresses
it's not likely to work with Linux. Some require special enabling of
the IRQ. The output of "lspci" can help determine if one can be
supported. If you see a 4-digit IO port and no long memory address,
the modem might work by just telling "setserial" the IO port and the
IRQ. Some people have gotten a 3COM 3CP5610 PCI Modem to work that
way.

6.2. Configuring Overview

In many cases, configuring will happen automatically and you have
nothing to do. But sometimes you need to configure (or just want to
check out the configuration). If so, first you need to know about the
two parts to configuring the serial port under Linux:

The first part (low-level configuring) is assigning it an IO address,
IRQ, and name (such as ttyS2). This IO-IRQ pair must be set in both
the hardware and told to the serial driver. We might just call this
"io-irq" configuring for short. The setserial is used to tell the
driver. PnP methods, jumpers, etc, are used to set the hardware.
Details will be supplied later. If you need to configure but don't
understand certain details it's easy to get into trouble.

The second part (high-level configuring) is assigning it a speed (such
as 38.4k bits/sec), selecting flow control, etc. This is often done
by communication programs such as PPP, minicom, or by getty (which you
may run on the port so that others may log into your computer).
However you will need to tell these programs what speed you want, etc.
by using a menu or a configuration file. This high-level configuring
may also be done with the stty program. stty is also useful to view
the current status if you're having problems. See also the section
``Stty'' When Linux starts, some effort is made to detect and
configure (low-level) a few serial ports. Exactly what happens
depends on your BIOS, hardware, Linux distribution, etc. If the
serial ports work OK, there may be no need for you to do any
configuring. Application programs often do the high-level configuring
but you may need to supply them with the required information. With
Plug-and-Play serial ports (often built into an internal modem), the
situation has become more complex. Here are cases when you need to do
low-level configuring (set IRQ and IO addresses):

� Plan to use more than 2 serial ports

� Installing a new serial port (such as an internal modem)

� Having problems with serial port(s)

For kernel 2.2+ you may be able to use more that 2 serial ports
without low-level configuring by sharing interrupts. This only works
if the serial hardware supports it and may be no easier than low-level
configuring. See ``Interrupt sharing and Kernels 2.2+''

The low-level configuring (setting the IRQ and IO address) seems to
cause people more trouble (than high-level), although for many it's
fully automatic and there is no configuring to be done. Thus most all
of this section is on that topic. Until the serial driver knows the
correct IRQ and IO address the port will not work at all. It may not
even be found by Linux. Even if it can be found, it may work
extremely slow if the IRQ is wrong. See ``Extremely Slow: Text
appears on the screen slowly after long delays''.

In the Wintel world, the IO address and IRQ are called "resources" and
we are thus configuring certain resources. But there are many other
types of "resources" so the term has many other meanings. In review,
the low-level configuring consists of putting two values (an IRQ
number and IO address) into two places:

1. the device driver (often by running "setserial" at boot-time)

2. memory registers of the serial port hardware itself

You may watch the start-up (= boot-time) messages. They are usually
correct. But if you're having problems, there's a good chance that
some of these messages don't show the true configuration of the
hardware (and they are not supposed to). See ``I/O Address & IRQ:
Boot-time messages''.

6.3. Common mistakes made re low-level configuring

Here are some common mistakes people make:

� setserial command: They run it (without the "autoconfig" option)
and think it has checked out the hardware (it hasn't).

� setserial messages: They see them displayed on the screen at boot-
time, and erroneously think that the result shows how their
hardware is actually configured.

� /proc/interrupts: When their serial device isn't in use they don't
see its interrupt there, and erroneously conclude that their serial
port can't be found (or doesn't have an interrupt set).

� /proc/ioports: People think this shows the hardware configuration
when it only shows about the same data (possibly erroneous) as
setserial.

6.4. I/O Address & IRQ: Boot-time messages

In many cases your ports will automatically get low-level configured
at boot-time (but not always correctly). To see what is happening,
look at the start-up messages on the screen. Don't neglect to check
the messages from the BIOS before Linux is loaded (no examples shown
here). These BIOS messages may be frozen by pressing the Pause key.
Use Shift-PageUp to go back to all the messages after they have flash
by. Shift-PageDown will scroll in the opposite direction. The dmesg
command may be used at any time to view some of the messages but it
often misses important ones. Here's an example of the start-up
messages (as of mid 1999). Note that ttyS00 is the same as
/dev/ttyS0.

At first you see what was detected (but the irq is only a wild guess):

Serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
ttyS02 at 0x03e8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A

Later you see what was saved, but it's not necessarily correct either:

Loading the saved-state of the serial devices...
/dev/ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
/dev/ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
/dev/ttyS2 at 0x03e8 (irq = 5) is a 16550A

Note that there is a slight disagreement: The first message shows
ttyS2 at irq=4 while the second shows it at irq=5. Your may only have
the first message. In most cases the last message is the correct one.
But if your having trouble it may be misleading. Before reading the
explanation of all of this complexity in the rest of this section, you
might just try using your serial port and see if it works OK. If so
it may not be essential to read further.

The second message is from the setserial program being run at boot-
time. It shows what the device driver thinks is the correct
configuration. But this too could be wrong. For example, the irq
could actually be set to irq=8 in the hardware (both messages wrong).
The irq=5 could be there because someone incorrectly put this into a
configuration file (or the like). The fact that Linux sometimes gets
IRQs wrong is because it doesn't probe for IRQs. It just assumes the
"standard" ones (first message) or accepts what you told it when you
configured it (second message). Neither of these is necessarily
correct. If the serial driver has the wrong IRQ the serial port is
very slow or doesn't seem to work at all.

The first message is a result of Linux probing the serial ports but it
doesn't probe for IRQs. If a port shows up here it exists but the IRQ
may be wrong. Linux doesn't check IRQs because doing so is not
foolproof. It just assumes the IRQs are as shown because they are the
"standard" values. Your may check them manually with setserial using
the autoconfig and auto_irq options but this isn't guaranteed to be
correct.

The data shown by the BIOS messages (which you see at first) is what
is set in the hardware. If your serial port is Plug-and-Play PnP then
it's possible that the isapnp will run and change these settings.
Look for messages about this after Linux starts. The last serial port
message shown in the example above should agree with the BIOS messages
(as possibly modified by isapnp). If they don't agree then you either
need to change the setting in the port hardware or use setserial to
tell the driver what is actually set in the hardware.

Also, if you have Plug-and-Play (PnP) serial ports, Linux will not
find them unless the IRQ and IO has been set inside the hardware by
Plug-and-Play software. This is a common reason why the start-up
messages do not show a serial port that physically exists. The PC
hardware (a PnP BIOS) may automatically low-level configure this. PnP
configuring will be explained later.

6.5. What is the current IO address and IRQ of my Serial Port ?

The previous section indicated how to attempt to do this by looking at
the start-up messages. If they give you sufficient info then you may
not need to read this section. If they don't then there are some
other ways to look into this.

There are really two answers to the question "What is my IO and IRQ?"
1. What the device driver thinks has been set (This is what setserial
usually sets and shows). 2. What is actually set in the hardware.
They both should be the same. If they're not it spells trouble since
the driver has incorrect info on the physical serial port. If the
driver has the wrong IO address it will try to send data to a non-
existing serial port --or even worse, to an actual device that is not
a serial port. If it has the wrong IRQ the driver will not get
interrupt service requests from the serial port, resulting in a very
slow or no response. See ``Extremely Slow: Text appears on the screen
slowly after long delays''. If it has the wrong model of UART there
is also apt to be trouble. To determine if both I0-IRQ pairs are
identical you must find out how they are set in both the driver and
the hardware.

6.5.1. What does the device driver think?

This is easy to find out. Just look at the start-up messages or type
"setserial -g /dev/ttyS*". If everything works OK then what it tells
you is likely also set in the hardware. There are some other ways to
find this info by looking at "files" in the /proc directory. An
important reason for understanding these other ways is to warn you
that they only show what the device driver thinks. Some people view
certain "files" in the /proc directory and erroneously think that what
they see is set in the hardware but "it ain't necessarily so".

/proc/ioports will show the IO addresses that the drivers are using.
/proc/interrupts shows the IRQs that are used by drivers of currently
running processes (that have devices open). It shows how many
interrupts have actually be issued. /proc/tty/driver/serial shows
most of the above, plus the number of bytes that have been received
and sent (even if the device is not now open).

Note that for the IO addresses and IRQ assignments, you are only
seeing what the driver thinks and not necessarily what is actually set
in the hardware. The data on the actual number of interrupts issued
and bytes processed is real however. If you see a large number of
interrupts and/or bytes then it probably means that the device is (or
was in the case of bytes) working. If there are no bytes received
(rx:0) but bytes were transmitted (tx:3749 for example), then only one
direction of flow is working (or being utilized).

Sometimes a showing of just a few interrupts doesn't mean that the
interrupt is actually being physically generated by any serial port.
Thus if you see almost no interrupts for a port that you're trying to
use, that interrupt might not be set in the hardware and it implies
that the driver is using the wrong interrupt. To view
/proc/interrupts to check on a program that you're currently running
(such as "minicom") you need to keep the program running while you
view it. To do this, try to jump to a shell without exiting the
program.

6.5.2. What is set in my serial port hardware ?

How do you find out what IO address and IRQ are actually set in the
device hardware? Perhaps the BIOS messages will tell you some info
before Linux starts booting. Use the shift-PageUp key to step back
thru the boot-time messages and look at the very first ones which are
from the BIOS. This is how it was before Linux started. Setserial
can't change it but isapnp or pciutils can.

One crude method is try probing with setserial using the "autoconfig"
option. You'll need to guess the addresses to probe at. See ``What
is Setserial''. For a PCI serial port, use the "lspci" command (for
kernels <2.2 look at /proc/pci). If your serial port is is Plug-and-
Play see the next two subsections.

For a port set with jumpers, its how the jumpers were set. If the
port is not Plug-and-Play (PnP) but has been setup by using a DOS
program then it's set at whatever the person who ran that program set
it to.

6.5.3. What is set in my PnP serial port hardware ?

PnP ports don't store their configuration in the hardware when the
power is turned off. This is in contrast to Jumpers (non-PnP) which
remain the same with the power off. If you have an ISA PnP port, it
can reach a state where it doesn't have any IO address or IRQ and is
in effect disabled. It should still be possible to find the port
using the pnpdump program.

For Plug-and-Play (PnP) on the ISA bus one may try the pnpdump program
(part of isapnptools). If you use the --dumpregs option then it
should tell you the actual IO address and IRQ set in the port. The
address it "trys" is not the device's IO address, but a special

For PnP ports checking on how it's configured under DOS/Windows may
not be of much help. Windows stores its configuration info in its
Registry which is not used by Linux. It may supply the BIOS's non-
volatile memory with some info but it may not be kept in sync with the
current Window configuration in the Registry ?? If you let a PnP BIOS
automatically do the configuring when you start Linux (and have told
the BIOS that you don't have a PnP operating system when running
Linux) then Linux should use whatever configuration is in the BIOS's
non-volatile memory.

6.6. Choosing Serial IRQs

If you have a true Plug-and-Play set up where either the OS or a PnP
BIOS configures all your devices, then you don't choose your IRQs.
PnP determines what it thinks is best and assigns them. But if you
use the tools in Linux for Plug-and-Play (isapnp and pcitools) then
you have to choose. If you already know what IRQ you want to use you
could skip this section except that you may want to know that IRQ 0
has a special use (see the following paragraph).

6.6.1. IRQ 0 is not an IRQ

While IRQ 0 is actually the timer (in hardware) it has a special
meaning for setting a serial port with setserial. It tells the driver
that there is no interrupt for the port and the driver then will use
polling methods. This is quite inefficient but can be tried if there
is an interrupt conflict or mis-set interrupt. The advantage of
assigning this is that you don't need to know what interrupt is set in
the hardware. It should be used only as a temporary expedient until
you are able to find a real interrupt to use.

6.6.2. Interrupt sharing and Kernels 2.2+

The general rule is that every device should use a unique IRQ and not
share them. But there are situations where sharing is permitted such
as with most multi-port boards. Even when it is permitted, it may not
be as efficient since every time a shared interrupt is given a check
must be made to determine where it came from. Thus if it's feasible,
it's nice to allocate every device its own interrupt.

Prior to kernel 2.2, serial IRQs could be shared with each other only
for most multiport boards. Starting with kernel 2.2 serial IRQs may
be sometimes shared between all serial ports. In order for sharing to
work in 2.2 the kernel must have been compiled with
CONFIG_SERIAL_SHARE_IRQ, and the serial port hardware must support
sharing (so that if two serial cards put different voltages on the
same interrupt wire, only the voltage that means "this is an
interrupt" will prevail). Thus even if you have 2.2, it may be best
to avoid sharing.

6.6.3. What IRQs to choose?

The serial hardware often has only a limited number of IRQs it can be
set at. Also you don't want IRQ conflicts. So there may not be much
of a choice. Your PC may normally come with ttyS0 and ttyS2 at IRQ 4,
and ttyS1 and ttyS3 at IRQ 3. Looking at /proc/interrupts will show
which IRQs are being used by programs currently running. You likely
don't want to use one of these. Before IRQ 5 was used for sound
cards, it was often used for a serial port.

Here is how Greg (original author of Serial-HOWTO) set his up in
/etc/rc.d/rc.serial. rc.serial is a file (shell script) which runs at
start-up (it may have a different name of location). For versions of
"setserial" after 2.15 it's not always done this way anymore but this
example does show the choice of IRQs.

/sbin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 irq 3 # my serial mouse
/sbin/setserial /dev/ttyS1 irq 4 # my Wyse dumb terminal
/sbin/setserial /dev/ttyS2 irq 5 # my Zoom modem
/sbin/setserial /dev/ttyS3 irq 9 # my USR modem

Standard IRQ assignments:

IRQ 0 Timer channel 0 (May mean "no interrupt". See below.)
IRQ 1 Keyboard
IRQ 2 Cascade for controller 2
IRQ 3 Serial port 2
IRQ 4 Serial port 1
IRQ 5 Parallel port 2, Sound card
IRQ 6 Floppy diskette
IRQ 7 Parallel port 1
IRQ 8 Real-time clock
IRQ 9 Redirected to IRQ2
IRQ 10 not assigned
IRQ 11 not assigned
IRQ 12 not assigned
IRQ 13 Math coprocessor
IRQ 14 Hard disk controller 1
IRQ 15 Hard disk controller 2

There is really no Right Thing to do when choosing interrupts. Just
make sure it isn't being used by the motherboard, or any other boards.
2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12 or 15 are possible choices. Note that IRQ 2
is the same as IRQ 9. You can call it either 2 or 9, the serial
driver is very understanding. If you have a very old serial board it
may not be able to use IRQs 8 and above.

Make sure you don't use IRQs 1, 6, 8, 13 or 14! These are used by
your motherboard. You will make her very unhappy by taking her IRQs.
When you are done, double-check /proc/interrupts when programs that
use interrupts are being run and make sure there are no conflicts.

6.7. Choosing Addresses --Video card conflict with ttyS3

The IO address of the IBM 8514 video board (and others like it) is
allegedly 0x?2e8 where ? is 2, 4, 8, or 9. This may conflict with the
IO address of ttyS3 at 0x02e8. Your may think that this shouldn't
happen since the addresses are different in the high order digit (the
leading 0 in 02e8). You're right, but a poorly designed serial port
may ignore the high order digit and respond to any address that ends
in 2e8. That is bad news if you try to use ttyS3 at this IO address.

In most cases you should use the default addresses if feasible.
Addresses shown represent the first address of an 8-byte range. For
example 3f8 is really the range 3f8-3ff. Each serial device (as well
as other types of devices that use IO addresses) needs its own unique
address range. There should be no overlaps (conflicts). Here are the
default addresses for commonly used serial ports:

ttyS0 address 0x3f8
ttyS1 address 0x2f8
ttyS2 address 0x3e8
ttyS3 address 0x2e8

Suppose there is an address conflict (as reported by setserial -g
/dev/ttyS*) between a real serial port and another port which does not
physically exist (and shows UART: unknown). Such a conflict shouldn't
cause problems but it sometimes does in older kernels. To avoid this
problem don't permit such address conflicts or delete /dev/ttyS? if it
doesn't physically exist.

6.8. Set IO Address & IRQ in the hardware (mostly for PnP)

After it's set in the hardware don't forget to insure that it also
gets set in the driver by using setserial. For non-PnP serial ports
they are either set in hardware by jumpers or by running a DOS program
("jumperless") to set them (it may disable PnP). The rest of this
subsection is only for PnP serial ports. Here's a list of the
possible methods of configuring PnP serial ports:

� Using a PnP BIOS CMOS setup menu (usually only for external devices
on ttyS0 (Com1) and ttyS1 (Com2))

� Letting a PnP BIOS automatically configure a PnP serial port See
``Using a PnP BIOS to I0-IRQ Configure''

� Doing nothing if you have both a PnP serial port and a PnP Linux
operating system (see Plug-and-Play-HOWTO).

� Using isapnp for a PnP serial port non-PCI)

� Using pciutils (pcitools) for the PCI bus

The IO address and IRQ must be set (by PnP) in their registers each
time the system is powered on since PnP hardware doesn't remember how
it was set when the power is shut off. A simple way to do this is to
let a PnP BIOS know that you don't have a PnP OS and the BIOS will
automatically do this each time you start. This might cause problems
in Windows (which is a PnP OS) if you start Windows with the BIOS
thinking that Windows is not a PnP OS. See Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.

Plug-and-Play was designed to automate this io-irq configuring, but
for Linux at present, it has made life more complicated. The standard
kernels for Linux don't support plug-and-play very well. If you use a
patch to the Linux kernel to covert it to a plug-and-play operating
system, then all of the above should be handled automatically by the
OS. But when you want to use this to automate configuring devices
other that the serial port, you may find that you'll still have to
configure the drivers manually since many Linux drivers are not
written to support a Linux PnP OS. If you use isapnptools or the BIOS
for configuring plug-and-play this will only put the two values into
the registers of the serial port section of the modem card and you
will likely still need to set up setserial. None of this is easy or
very well documented as of early 1999. See Plug-and-Play-HOWTO and
the isapnptools FAQ.

6.8.1. Using a PnP BIOS to I0-IRQ Configure

While the explanation of how to use a PnP OS or isapnp for io-irq
configuring should come with such software, this is not the case if
you want to let a PnP BIOS do such configuring. Not all PnP BIOS can
do this. The BIOS usually has a CMOS menu for setting up the first
two serial ports. This menu may be hard to find and for an "Award"
BIOS it was found under "chipset features setup" There is often
little to choose from. Unless otherwise indicated in a menu, these
first two ports normally get set at the standard IO addresses and
IRQs. See ``Serial Port Device Names & Numbers''

Whether you like it or not, when you start up a PC a PnP BIOS starts
to do PnP (io-irq) configuring of hardware devices. It may do the job
partially and turn the rest over to a PnP OS (which you probably don't
have) or if thinks you don't have a PnP OS it may fully configure all
the PnP devices but not configure the device drivers. This is what
you want but it's not always easy to figure out exactly what the PnP
BIOS has done.

If you tell the BIOS that you don't have a PnP OS, then the PnP BIOS
should do the configuring of all PnP serial ports --not just the first
two. An indirect way to control what the BIOS does (if you have
Windows 9x on the same PC) is to "force" a configuration under
Windows. See Plug-and-Play-HOWTO and search for "forced". It's
easier to use the CMOS BIOS menu which may override what you "forced"
under Windows. There could be a BIOS option that can set or disable
this "override" capability.

If you add a new PnP device, the BIOS should change its PnP
configuration to accommodate it. It could even change the io-irq of
existing devices if required to avoid any conflicts. For this
purpose, it keeps a list of non-PnP devices provided that you have
told the BIOS how these non-PnP devices are io-irq configured. One
way to tell the BIOS this is by running a program called ICU under
DOS/Windows.

But how do you find out what the BIOS has done so that you set up the
device drivers with this info? The BIOS itself may provide some info,
either in its setup menus of via messages on the screen when you turn
on your computer. See ``What is set in my serial port hardware?''

6.9. Giving the IRQ and IO Address to Setserial

Once you've set the IRQ and IO address in the hardware (or arranged
for it to be done by PnP) you also need to insure that the "setserial"
command is run each time you start Linux. See the subsection ``Boot-
time Configuration''

6.10. High-level Configuring: stty, etc.

As a rule, your application program will do most (or all) of this.
The command which does it is stty. See ``Stty''

6.10.1. Configuring Flow Control: Hardware Flow Control is Best

See ``Flow Control'' for an explanation of it. It's usually better to
use hardware flow control rather than software flow control using
Xon/Xoff. To use full hardware flow control you must normally have
two wires for it in the cable between the serial port and the device.
If the device is on a card, then it should always be possible to use
hardware flow control.

Many applications (and the getty program) give you an option regarding
flow control and will set it for you. It might even set hardware flow
control by default. Like the IRQ and IO address, it must be set both
in the serial driver and the hardware connected to the serial port.
How it's set into the hardware is hardware dependent. Often there is
a certain "init string" you send to the hardware device via the serial
port from your PC. For a modem, the communication program should set
it in both places.

If a program you use doesn't set flow control in the serial driver,
then you may do it yourself using the stty command. Since the driver
doesn't remember the setting after you stop Linux, you could put the
stty command in a file that runs at start-up or when you login (such
as /etc/profile for the bash shell). Heres what you would add for
hardware flow control for port ttyS2:

stty crtscts < /dev/ttyS2
or for stty version >= 1.17:
stty -F /dev/ttyS2 crtscts

crtscts stands for a Control setting to use the RTS and CTS pins of
the serial port for hardware flow control. The upper case letters of
the last sentence spell: crtscts.

7. Serial Port Devices /dev/ttyS2, etc.

For creating devices in the device directory see

``Creating Devices In the /dev directory''

7.1. Serial Port Device Names & Numbers

Devices in Linux have major and minor numbers. Each serial port may
have 2 possible names in the /dev directory: ttyS and cua. Their
drivers behave slightly differently. The cua device is deprecated and
will not be used in the future. See the Modem-HOWTO section: "The cua
Device".

Dos/Windows use the COM name while the setserial program uses tty00,
tty01, etc. Don't confuse these with dev/tty0, dev/tty1, etc. which
are used for the console (your PC monitor) but are not serial ports.
The table below is for the "standard" case (but yours could be
different).

IO
dos major minor major minor address
COM1 /dev/ttyS0 4, 64; /dev/cua0 5, 64 3F8
COM2 /dev/ttyS1 4, 65; /dev/cua1 5, 65 2F8
COM3 /dev/ttyS2 4, 66; /dev/cua2 5, 66 3E8
COM4 /dev/ttyS3 4, 67; /dev/cua3 5, 67 2E8

Note that all distributions should come with ttyS devices (and many
distributions have the obsolete cua device). You can verify this by
typing (don't feel bad if you don't find any obsolete cua devices):

linux% ls -l /dev/cua*
linux% ls -l /dev/ttyS*

7.2. Link ttySN to /dev/modem ?

On some installations, two extra devices will be created, /dev/modem
for your modem and /dev/mouse for your mouse. Both of these are
symbolic links to the appropriate device in /dev which you specified
during the installation (unless you have a bus mouse, then /dev/mouse
will point to the bus mouse device).

There has been some discussion on the merits of /dev/mouse and
/dev/modem. The use of these links is discouraged. In particular, if
you are planning on using your modem for dialin you may run into
problems because the lock files may not work correctly if you use
/dev/modem. However, if you change or remove this link, some
applications might need reconfiguration.

7.3. Notes For Multiport Boards

For board addresses, and IRQs, look at the rc.serial or
/etc/rc.boot/0setserial that comes with the setserial program. It has
a lot of detail on multiport boards, including I/O addresses and
device names.

7.4. Creating Devices In the /dev directory

If you don't have a device, you will have to create it with the mknod
command. Example, suppose you needed to create devices for ttyS0:

linux# mknod -m 666 /dev/cua0 c 5 64 (cua devices are now obsolete)
linux# mknod -m 666 /dev/ttyS0 c 4 64

You can use the MAKEDEV script, which lives in /dev. See the man page
for it. This simplifies the making of devices. For example, if you
needed to make the devices for ttyS0 you would type:

linux# cd /dev
linux# ./MAKEDEV ttyS0

This handles the devices creation and should set the correct permis�
sions.

8. Interesting Programs You Should Know About

Most info on getty has been moved to Modem-HOWTO with a little info on
the use of getty with directly connected terminals now found in Text-
Terminal-HOWTO.

8.1. Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics Programs

A few Linux programs (and one "file") will monitor various modem
control lines and indicate if they are positive (1 or green) or
negative (0 or red).

� The "file": /proc/tty/driver/serial lists those that are positive

� modemstat (Only works correctly on Linux PC consoles. Status
monitored in a tiny window. Color-coded and compact. Must kill it
(a process) to quit.

� statserial (Info displayed on entire screen)

� serialmon (Doesn't monitor RTS, CTS, DSR but logs other functions)

You may already have them. If not, download them from Serial
Software <http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/serial/>. As of
June 1998, I know of no diagnostic program in Linux for the serial
port.

8.2. Changing Interrupt Priority

� irqtune will give serial port interrupts higher priority to improve
performance.

� hdparm for hard-disk tuning may help some more.

8.3. What is Setserial ?

This part is in 3 HOWTOs: Modem, Serial, and Text-Terminal. There are
some minor differences, depending on which HOWTO it appears in.

8.3.1. Introduction

Don't ever use setserial with Laptops (PCMCIA). setserial is a
program which allows you to tell the device driver software the I/O
address of the serial port, which interrupt (IRQ) is set in the port's
hardware, what type of UART you have, etc. It can also show how the
driver is currently set. In addition, it can be made to probe the
hardware and try to determine the UART type and IRQ, but this has
severe limitations. See ``Probing''. Note that it can't set the IRQ
or the port address in the hardware of PnP serial ports.

If you only have one or two built-in serial ports, they will usually
get set up correctly without using setserial. Otherwise (or if there
are problems with the serial port) you will likely need to deal with
setserial. Besides the man page for setserial, check out info in
/usr/doc/setserial.../ or /usr/share/doc/setserial. It should tell
you how setserial is handled in your distribution of Linux.

Setserial is often run automatically at boot-time by a start-up shell-
script for the purpose of assigning IRQs, etc. to the driver.
Setserial will only work if the serial module is loaded (or if the
equivalent was compiled into your kernel). If you should (for some
reason) unload the serial module later on, the changes previously made
by setserial will be forgotten by the kernel. So setserial must be
run again to reestablish them. In addition to running via a start-up
script, something akin to setserial also runs earlier when the serial
module is loaded (or the like). Thus when you watch the start-up
messages on the screen it may look like it ran twice, and in fact it
has.

Setserial can set the time that the port will keep operating after
it's closed (in order to output any characters still in its buffer in
main RAM). This is needed at slow baud rates of 1200 or lower. It's
also needed at higher speeds if there are a lot of "flow control"
waits. See "closing_wait" in the man pg.

Setserial does not set either IRQ's nor I/O addresses in the serial
port hardware itself. That is done either by jumpers or by plug-and-
play. You must tell setserial the identical values that have been set
in the hardware. Do not just invent some values that you think would
be nice to use and then tell them to setserial. However, if you know
the I/O address but don't know the IRQ you may command setserial to
attempt to determine the IRQ.

You can see a list of possible commands by just typing setserial with
no arguments. This fails to show you the one-letter options such as
-v for verbose which you should normally use when troubleshooting.
Note that setserial calls an IO address a "port". If you type:

setserial -g /dev/ttyS*

you'll see some info about how that device driver is configured for
your ports. Note that where it says "UART: unknown" it probably means
that no uart exists. In other words you probably have no such serial
port and the other info shown about the port is meaningless and should
be ignored. If you really do have such a serial port, setserial
doesn't recognize it and that needs to be fixed.

If you add -a to the option -g you will see more info although few
people need to deal with (or understand) this additional info since
the default settings you see usually work fine. In normal cases the
hardware is set up the same way as "setserial" reports, but if you are
having problems there is a good chance that "setserial" has it wrong.
In fact, you can run "setserial" and assign a purely fictitious I/O
port address, any IRQ, and whatever uart type you would like to have.
Then the next time you type "setserial ..." it will display these
bogus values without complaint. Of course the serial port driver will
not work correctly (if at all) if you attempt to use such a port.
Thus when giving parameters to "setserial" anything goes. It gives
you no warning if what you tell it is incorrect and will allow you to
create conflicts in IRQs and I/O port addresses that will have
disastrous results later on.

While assignments made by setserial are lost when the PC is powered
off, a configuration file may restore them (or a previous
configuration) when the PC is started up again. In newer versions,
what you change by setserial gets automatically saved to a
configuration file. In older versions, the configuration file only
changes if you edit it manually so the configuration remains the same
from boot to boot. See ``Configuration Scripts/Files''

8.3.2. Probing

With appropriate options, setserial can probe (at a given I/O address)
for a serial port but you must guess the I/O address. If you ask it
to probe for /dev/ttyS2 for example, it will only probe at the address
it thinks ttyS2 is at (2F8). If you tell setserial that ttyS2 is at a
different address, then it will probe at that address, etc. See
``Probing''

The purpose of this is to see if there is a uart there, and if so,
what its IRQ is. Use "setserial" mainly as a last resort as there are
faster ways to attempt it such as wvdialconf to detect modems, looking
at very early boot-time messages, or using pnpdump --dumpregs. To try
to detect the physical hardware use the -v (verbose) and autoconfig
command to setserial. If the resulting message shows a uart type such
as 16550A, then you're OK. If instead it shows "unknown" for the uart
type, then there is supposedly no serial port at all at that I/O
address. Some cheap serial ports don't identify themselves correctly
so if you see "unknown" you still might have a serial port there.

Besides auto-probing for a uart type, setserial can auto-probe for
IRQ's but this doesn't always work right either. In versions of
setserial >= 2.15, the results of your last probe test may be saved
and put into the configuration file /etc/serial.conf which will be
used next time you start Linux. At boot-time when the serial module
loads (or the like), a probe for UARTs is made automatically and
reported on the screen. But the IRQs shown may be wrong. The second
report of the same is the result of a script which usually does no
probing and thus provides no reliable information as to how the
hardware is actually set. It only shows configuration date someone
wrote into the script or data that got saved in /etc/serial.conf.

It may be that two serial ports both have the same IO address set in
the hardware. Of course this is not permitted but it sometimes
happens anyway. Probing detects one serial port when actually there
are two. However if they have different IRQs, then the probe for IRQs
may show IRQ = 0. For me it only did this if I first used setserial
to give the IRQ a ficticious value.

8.3.3. Boot-time Configuration

When the kernel loads the serial module (or if the "module equivalent"
is built into the kernel) then only ttyS{0-3} are auto-detected and
the driver is set to use only IRQs 4 and 3 (regardless of what IRQs
are actually set in the hardware). You see this as a boot-time
message just like as if setserial had been run. If you use 3 or more
ports, this may result in IRQ conflicts.

To fix such conflicts by telling setserial the true IRQs (or for other
reasons) there may be a file somewhere that runs setserial again.
This happens early at boot-time before any process uses the serial
port. In fact, your distribution may have set things up so that the
setserial program runs automatically from a start-up script at boot-
time. More info about how to handle this situation for your
particular distribution might be found in file named "setserial..." or
the like located in directory /usr/doc/ or /usr/share/doc/.

8.3.4. Configuration Scripts/Files

Your objective is to modify (or create) a script file in the /etc tree
that runs setserial at boot-time. Most distributions provide such a
file (but it may not initially reside in the /etc tree). In addition,
setserial 2.15 and higher often have an /etc/serial.conf file that is
used by the above script so that you don't need to directly edit the
script that runs setserial. In addition just using setserial on the
command line (2.15+) may ultimately alter this configuration file.

So prior to version 2.15 all you do is edit a script. After 2.15 you
may need to either do one of three things: 1. edit a script. 2. edit
/etc/serial.conf or 3. run "setserial" on the command line which will
result in /etc/serial.conf automatically being edited. Which one of
these you need to do depends on both your particular distribution, and
how you have set it up.

8.3.5. Edit a script (after version 2.15: perhaps not)

Prior to setserial 2.15 (1999) there was no /etc/serial.conf file to
configure setserial. Thus you need to find the file that runs
"setserial" at boot time and edit it. If it doesn't exist, you need
to create one (or place the commands in a file that runs early at
boot-time). If such a file is currently being used it's likely
somewhere in the /etc directory-tree. But Redhat <6.0 has supplied it
in /usr/doc/setserial/ but you need to move it to the /etc tree before
using it. You might use "locate" to try to find such a file. For
example, you could type: locate "*serial*".

The script /etc/rc.d/rc.serial was commonly used in the past. The
Debian distribution used /etc/rc.boot/0setserial. Another file once
used was /etc/rc.d/rc.local but it's not a good idea to use this since
it may not be run early enough. It's been reported that other
processes may try to open the serial port before rc.local runs
resulting in serial communication failure.

If such a file is supplied, it should contain a number of commented-
out examples. By uncommenting some of these and/or modifying them,
you should be able to set things up correctly. Make sure that you are
using a valid path for setserial, and a valid device name. You could
do a test by executing this file manually (just type its name as the
super-user) to see if it works right. Testing like this is a lot
faster than doing repeated reboots to get it right. Of course you can
also test a single setserial command by just typing it on the command
line.

If you want setserial to automatically determine the uart and the IRQ
for ttyS3 you would add something like:

/sbin/setserial /dev/ttyS3 auto_irq skip_test autoconfig

Do this for every serial port you want to auto configure. Be sure to
give a device name that really does exist on your machine. In some
cases this will not work right due to the hardware so if you know what
the uart and irq actually are, may want to assign them explicitly with
"setserial". For example:

/sbin/setserial /dev/ttyS3 irq 5 uart 16550A skip_test

For versions >= 2.15 (provided your distribution implemented the
change, Redhat didn't) it may be more tricky to do since the file that
runs setserial on startup, /etc/init.d/setserial or the like was not
intended to be edited by the user. See ``New configuration method
using /etc/serial.conf''.

8.3.6. New configuration method using /etc/serial.conf

Prior to setserial version 2.15, the way to configure setserial was to
manually edit the shell-script that ran setserial at boot-time. See
``Edit a script (after version 2.15: perhaps not)''. Starting with
version 2.15 (1999) of setserial this shell-script is not edited but
instead gets its data from a configuration file: /etc/serial.conf.
Furthermore you may not even need to edit serial.conf because using
the "setserial" command on the command line may automatically cause
serial.conf to be edited appropriately.

This was intended to make it so that you don't need to edit any file
in order to set up (or change) setserial so it will do the right thing
each time that Linux is booted. But there are serious pitfalls
because it's not really "setserial" that edits serial.conf. Confusion
is compounded because different distributions handle this differently.
In addition, you may modify it so it works differently.

What often happens is this: When you shut down your PC the script
that runs "setserial" at boot-time is run again, but this time it only
does what the part for the "stop" case says to do: It uses
"setserial" to find out what the current state of "setserial" is and
puts that info into the serial.conf file. Thus when you run
"setserial" to change the serial.conf file, it doesn't get changed
immediately but only when and if you shut down normally.

Now you can perhaps guess what problems might occur. Suppose you
don't shut down normally (someone turns the power off, etc.) and the
changes don't get saved. Suppose you experiment with "setserial" and
forget to run it a final time to restore the original state (or make a
mistake in restoring the original state). Then your "experimental"
settings are saved.

If you manually edit serial.conf, then your editing is destroyed when
you shut down because it gets changed back to the state of setserial
at shutdown. There is a way to disable the changing of serial.conf at
shutdown and that is to remove "###AUTOSAVE###" or the like from first
line of serial.conf. In at least one distribution, the removal of
"###AUTOSAVE###" from the first line is automatically done after the
first time you shutdown just after installation. The serial.conf file
will hopefully contain some comments to help you out.

The file most commonly used to run setserial at boot-time (in
conformance with the configuration file) is now /etc/init.d/setserial
(Debian) or /etc/init.d/serial (Redhat), or etc., but it should not
normally be edited. For 2.15 Redhat 6.0 just had a file
/usr/doc/setserial-2.15/rc.serial which you have to move to
/etc/init.d/ if you want setserial to run at boot-time.

To disable a port, use setserial to set it to "uart none". The format
of /etc/serial.conf appears to be just like that of the parameters
placed after "setserial" on the command line with one line for each
port. If you don't use autosave, you may edit /etc/serial.conf
manually.

BUG: As of July 1999 there is a bug/problem since with ###AUTOSAVE###
only the setserial parameters displayed by "setserial -Gg /dev/ttyS*"
get saved but the other parameters don't get saved. Use the -a flag
to "setserial" to see all parameters. This will only affect a small
minority of users since the defaults for the parameters not saved are
usually OK for most situations. It's been reported as a bug and may
be fixed by now.

In order to force the current settings set by setserial to be saved to
the configuration file (serial.conf) without shutting down, do what
normally happens when you shutdown: Run the shell-script
/etc/init.d/{set}serial stop. The "stop" command will save the
current configuration but the serial ports still keep working OK.

In some cases you may wind up with both the old and new configuration
methods installed but hopefully only one of them runs at boot-time.
Debian labeled obsolete files with "...pre-2.15".

8.3.7. IRQs

By default, both ttyS0 and ttyS2 will share IRQ 4, while ttyS1 and
ttyS3 share IRQ 3. But actually sharing serial interrupts (using them
in running programs) is not permitted unless you: 1. have kernel 2.2
or better, and 2. you've complied in support for this, and 3. your
serial hardware supports it. See

``Interrupt sharing and Kernels 2.2+''

If you only have two serial ports, ttyS0 and ttyS1, you're still OK
since IRQ sharing conflicts don't exist for non-existent devices.

If you add an internal modem and retain ttyS0 and ttyS1, then you
should attempt to find an unused IRQ and set it both on your serial
port (or modem card) and then use setserial to assign it to your
device driver. If IRQ 5 is not being used for a sound card, this may
be one you can use for a modem. To set the IRQ in hardware you may
need to use isapnp, a PnP BIOS, or patch Linux to make it PnP. To
help you determine which spare IRQ's you might have, type "man
setserial" and search for say: "IRQ 11".

8.4. Stty

8.4.1. Introduction

stty does much of the configuration of the serial port but since
application programs (and the getty program) often handle it, you may
not need to use it much. It's handy if your having problems or want
to see how the port is set up. Try typing ``stty -a'' at your
terminal/console to see how it's now set. Also try typing it without
the -a (all) for a short listing which shows how it's set different
than normal. Don't try to learn all the setting unless you want to
become a serial guru. Most of the defaults should work OK and some of
the settings are needed only for certain obsolete dumb terminals made
in the 1970's.

Whereas setserial only deals with actual serial ports, stty is used
both for serial ports and for virtual terminals such as the standard
Linux text interface at a PC monitor. For the PC monitor, many of the
stty settings are meaningless. Changing the baud rate, etc. doesn't
appear to actually do anything.

Here are some of the items stty configures: speed (bits/sec), parity,
bits/byte, # of stop bits, strip 8th bit?, modem control signals, flow
control, break signal, end-of-line markers, change case, padding, beep
if buffer overrun?, echo what you type to the screen, allow background
tasks to write to terminal?, define special (control) characters (such
as what key to press for interrupt). See the stty man or info page
for more details. Also see the man page: termios which covers the
same options set by stty but (as of mid 1999) covers features which
the stty man page fails to mention.

With some implementations of getty (getty_ps package), the commands
that one would normally give to stty are typed into a getty
configuration file: /etc/gettydefs. Even without this configuration
file, the getty command line may be sufficient to set things up so
that you don't need stty."')

One may write C programs which change the stty configuration, etc.
Looking at some of the documentation for this may help one better
understand the use of the stty command (and its many possible
arguments). Serial-Programming-HOWTO is useful. The manual page:
termios contains a description of the C-language structure (of type
termios) which stores the stty configuration in computer memory. Many
of the flag names in this C-structure are almost the same (and do the
same thing) as the arguments to the stty command.

8.4.2. Using stty for a "foreign" terminal

Using stty to inspect or configure the terminal that you are currently
using is easy. Doing it for a different (foreign) terminal or serial
port may be tricky. For example, let's say you are at the PC monitor
(tty1) and want to use stty to deal with the serial port ttyS2. Prior
to about 2000 you needed to use the redirection operator "<". After
2000 (provided your version of setserial is >= 1.17 and stty >= 2.0)
there is an alternate method using the -F option. This will work when
the old redirection method fails. Even with the latest versions be
warned that if there is a terminal on ttyS2 and a shell is running on
that terminal, then what you see will likely be deceptive and trying
to set it will not work. See ``Two Interfaces at a Terminal'' to
understand it.

The new method is ``stty -F /dev/ttyS2 ...'' (or --file instead of F).
If ... is -a it displays all the stty settings. The old redirection
method (which still works in later versions) is to type ``stty ...
</dev/ttyS2''. If the new method works but the old one hangs, it
implies that the port is hung due to lack of a modem control line from
being asserted. Thus the old method is still useful for
troubleshooting. See the following subsection.

8.4.2.1. Old redirection method

Here's a problem with the old redirection operator (which doesn't
happen if you use the newer -F option instead). Sometimes when trying
to use stty, the command hangs and nothing happens (you don't get a
prompt for a next command even after hitting <return>). This is
likely due to the port being stuck because it's waiting for one of the
modem control lines to be asserted. For example, unless you've set
"clocal" to ignore modem control lines, then if no CD signal is
asserted the port will not open and stty will not work for it (unless
you use the newer -F option). A similar situation seems to exist for
hardware flow control. If the cable for the port doesn't even have a
conductor for the pin that needs to be asserted then there is no easy
way to stop the hang.

One way to try to get out of the above hang is to use the newer -F
option and set "clocal" and/or "crtscts". If you don't have the -F
option then you may try to run program on the port that will force it
to operate even if the control lines say not to. Then hopefully this
program might set the port so it doesn't need the control signal in
the future in order to open: clocal or -crtscts. To use "minicom" to
do this you have to reconfigure minicom for another ttyS, etc, and
then exit it and restart it. Since you then have to reconfigure
minicom again, it may be simpler to just reboot the PC.

The old redirection method makes ttyS2 the standard input to stty.
This gives the stty program a link to the "file" ttyS2 so that it may
"read" it. But instead of reading the bytes sent to ttyS2 as one
might expect, it uses the link to find the configuration settings of
the port so that it may read or change them. Some people tried to use
``stty ... > /dev/ttyS2'' to set the terminal. This will not do it.
Instead, it takes the message normal displayed by the stty command for
the terminal you are on (say tty1) and sends this message to ttyS2.
But it doesn't change any settings for ttyS2.

8.4.3. Two interfaces at a terminal

When using a shell (such as bash) with command-line-editing enabled
there are two different terminal interfaces (what you see when you
type stty -a). When you type at the command line you have a temporary
"raw" interface (or raw mode) where each character is read by the
command-line-editor as you type it. Once you hit the <return> key,
the command-line-editor is exited and the terminal interface is
changed to the nominal "cooked" interface (cooked mode) for the
terminal. This cooked mode lasts until the next prompt is sent to the
terminal. Note that one never types anything to this cooked mode but
what was typed in raw mode becomes cooked mode as soon as one hits the
<return> key.

When a prompt is sent to the terminal the terminal goes from "cooked"
to "raw" mode (just like it does when you start an editor since you
are starting the command-line editor). The settings for the "raw"
mode are based only on the basic settings taken from the "cooked"
mode. Raw mode keeps these setting but changes several other settings
in order to change the mode to "raw". It is not at all based on the
settings used in the previous "raw" mode. Thus if one uses stty to
change settings for the raw mode, such settings will be lost as soon
as one hits the <return> key at the terminal that has supposedly been
"set".

Now when one types stty to look at the terminal interface, one may
either get a view of the cooked mode or the raw mode. You need to
figure out which one you're looking at. It you use stty from another
terminal to deal with a terminal that is displaying a command line,
then the view is that of the raw mode. Any changes made will only be
made to the raw mode and will be lost when someone presses <return> at
the terminal you tried to "set". But if you type a stty command at
your terminal (without using < for redirection) and then hit <return>
it's a different story. The <return> puts the terminal in cooked
mode. Your changes are saved and will still be there when the
terminal goes back into raw mode (unless of course it's a setting not
allowed in raw mode).

This situation can create problems. For example, suppose you corrupt
your terminal interface and to restore it you go to another terminal
and "stty -F dev/ttyS1 sane" (or the like) to restore it. It will not
work! Of course you can try to type "stty sane ..." at the terminal
that is corrupted but you can't see what you typed. All the above not
only applies to dumb terminals but to virtual terminals used on a PC
Monitor as well as to the terminal windows in X. In other words, it
applies to almost everyone who uses Linux. Luckily, a file that runs
stty at boot-time will likely deal with a terminal (or serial port
with no terminal) that has no shell running on it so there's no
problem.

8.4.4. Where to put the stty command ?

Should you need to have stty set up the serial interface each time the
computer starts up then you need to put the stty command in a file
that will be executed each time the computer is started up (Linux
boots). It should be run before the serial port is used (including
running getty on the port). There are many possible places to put it.
If it gets put in more than one place and you only know about (or
remember) one of those places, then a conflict is likely. So make
sure to document what you do.

One place to put it would be in the same file that runs setserial when
the system is booted. The location is distribution and version
dependent. It would seem best to put it after the setserial command
so that the low level stuff is done first. If you have directories in
the /etc tree where every file in them is executed at boot-time
(System V Init) then you could create a file named "stty" for this
purpose.

8.5. What is isapnp ?

isapnp is a program to configure Plug-and-Play (PnP) devices on the
ISA bus including internal modems. It comes in a package called
"isapnptools" and includes another program, "pnpdump" which finds all
your ISA PnP devices and shows you options for configuring them in a
format which may be added to the PnP configuration file:
/etc/isapnp.conf. The isapnp command may be put into a startup file
so that it runs each time you start the computer and thus will
configure ISA PnP devices. It is able to do this even if your BIOS
doesn't support PnP. See Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.

9. Speed (Flow Rate)

By "speed" we really mean the "data flow rate" but almost everybody
incorrectly calls it speed. The speed is measured in bits/sec (or
baud). Speed is set using the "stty" command or by a program which
uses the serial port. See ``Stty''

9.1. Can't Set a High Enough Speed

You need to find out the highest speed supported by your hardware. As
of late 1998 most hardware only supported speeds up to 115.2k bps. A
few 56k internal modems support 230.4k bps. Recent Linux kernels
support high speeds (over 115.2k) but you might have difficulty using
it because of one or both of the following reasons:

1. The application program (or stty) will not accept the high speed.

2. Setserial has a default speed of 115,200 (but this default is easy
to change)

9.1.1. How speed is set in hardware: the divisor and baud_base

Here's a list of commonly used divisors and their corresponding speeds
(assuming a maximum speed of 115,200): 1 (115.2k), 2 (57.6k), 3
(38.4k), 6 (19.2k), 12 (9.6k), 24 (4.8k), 48 (2.4k), 96 (1.2k), etc.
The serial driver sets the speed in the hardware by sending the
hardware only a "divisor" (a positive integer). This "divisor"
divides the maximum speed of the hardware resulting in a slower speed
(except a divisor of 1 obviously tells the hardware to run at maximum
speed).

Normally, if you specify a speed of 115.2k (in your communication
program or by stty) then the serial driver sets the port hardware to
divisor 1 which obviously sets the highest speed. If you happen to
have hardware with a maximum speed of say 230.4k, then specifying
115.2k will result in divisor 1 and will actually give you 230.4k.
This is double the speed that you set. In fact, for any speed you
set, the actual speed will be double. If you had hardware that could
run at 460.8k then the actual speed would be quadruple what you set.

9.1.2. Work-arounds for setting speed

To correct this accounting (but not always fix the problem) you may
use "setserial" to change the baud_base to the actual maximal speed of
your port such as 230.4k. Then if you set the speed (by your
application or by stty) to 230.4k, a divisor of 1 will be used and
you'll get the same speed as you set. PROBLEM: stty and many
communication programs (as of mid 1999) still have 115.2k as their
maximum speed setting and will not let you set 230.4k, etc. So in
these cases one solution is not to change anything with setserial but
mentally keep in mind that the actual speed is always double what you
set.

There's another work-around which is not much better. To use it you
set the baud_base (with setserial) to the maximal speed of your
hardware. This corrects the accounting so that if you set say 115.2k
you actually get 115.2k. Now you still have to figure out how to set
the highest speed if your communication program (or the like) will not
let you do it. Fortunately, setserial has a way to do this: use the
"spd_cust" parameter with "divisor 1". Then when you set the speed to
38400 in a communication program, the divisor will be set to 1 in the
port and it will operate at maximum speed. For example:
setserial /dev/ttyS2 spd_cust baud_base 230400 divisor 1
Don't try using "divisor" for any other purpose other than the special
use illustrated above (with spd_cust).

If there are two or more high speeds that you want to use that your
communication program can't set, then it's not quite as easy as above.
But the same principles apply. You could just keep the default
baud_base and understand that when you set a speed you are really only
setting a divisor. So your actual speed will always be your maximum
speed divided by whatever divisor is set by the serial driver. See
``How speed is set in hardware: the divisor and baud_base''

9.1.3. Crystal frequency is not baud_base

Note that the baud_base setting is usually much lower than the
frequency of the crystal oscillator in the hardware since the crystal
frequency is often divided by 16 in the hardware to get the actual top
speed. The reason the crystal frequency needs to be higher is so that
this high crystal speed can be used to take a number of samples of
each bit to determine if it's a 1 or a 0.

9.2. Higher Serial Throughput

If you are seeing slow throughput and serial port overruns on a system
with (E)IDE disk drives, you can get hdparm. This is a utility that
can modify (E)IDE parameters, including unmasking other IRQs during a
disk IRQ. This will improve responsiveness and will help eliminate
overruns. Be sure to read the man page very carefully, since some
drive/controller combinations don't like this and may corrupt the
filesystem.

Also have a look at a utility called irqtune that will change the IRQ
priority of a device, for example the serial port that your modem is
on. This may improve the serial throughput on your system. The
irqtune FAQ is at http://www.best.com/~cae/irqtune
<http://www.best.com/~cae/irqtune>

10. Locking Out Others

10.1. Introduction

When you are using a serial port, you may want to prevent others from
using it at the same time. However there may be cases where you do
want others to use it, such as sending you an important message if you
are using a text-terminal.

There are various ways of preventing others (or other processes) from
using your serial port when you are using it (locking). This should
all happen automatically but it's important to know about this if it
gives you trouble. If a program is abnormally exited or the PC is
abruptly turned off (by pulling the plug, etc.) your serial port might
wind up locked. Even if the lock remains, it's usually automatically
removed when you want to use the serial port again. But in rare cases
it isn't. That's when you need to understand what happened.

One way to implement locking is to design the kernel to handle it but
Linux thus far has shunned this solution (with an exception involving
the cua device which is now obsolete). Two solutions used by Linux is
to:

1. create lock-files

2. modify the permissions and/or owners of devices such as /dev/ttyS2

10.2. Lock-Files

A lock-file is simply a file created to mean that a particular device
is in use. They are kept in /var/lock. Formerly they were in
/usr/spool/uucp. Linux lock-files are sometimes named LCK..name,
where name is either a device name, or a UUCP site name. Most
processes (an exception is getty) create these locks so that they can
have exclusive access to devices. For instance if you dial out on
your modem, a lock-file (or even more that one lockfile) will appear
telling other processes that someone else is using the modem. Lock
files contain the PID of the process that has locked the device. Note
that if a process insists on using a device that is locked, it may
ignore the lockfile and use the device anyway. This is useful in
sending a message to a text-terminal, etc.

When a program wants to use a serial port but finds it locked with a
lock-file it should check to see if the lock-file's PID is still in
use. If it's not it means that the lock is stale and it's OK to go
ahead and use the port anyway (after removing the stale lock-file).
Unfortunately, there may be some programs that don't do this and give
up by telling you that a device is already in use when it really
isn't.

Problems can arise with lockfiles if the same device has two different
names, resulting in lockfiles with different names that actually are
the same device. Formerly each physical serial port was known by two
different device names: ttyS0 and cua0. The lock checking software is
aware of ttyS vs. cua but it's simpler now since cua has been
eliminated. Older versions may still use cua. Using alternate names
(such as /dev/modem for /dev/ttyS2) is asking for trouble.

10.3. Change Owners, Groups, and/or Permissions of Device Files

In order to use a device, you (or the program you run if you have "set
user id") needs to have permission to read and write the device "file"
in the /dev directory. So a logical way to prevent others from using
a device is to make yourself the temporary owner of the device and set
permissions so that no one else can use it. A program may do this for
you. A similar method can be used with the group of the device file.

While lock files prevent other process from using the device, changing
device file owners/permissions restricts other users (or the group)
from using it. One case is where the group is permitted to write to
the port, but not to read from it. Writing to the port might just
mean a message sent to a text-terminal while reading means destructive
reading. The original process that needs to read the data may find
data missing if another process has already read that data. Thus a
read can do more harm that a write since a read causes loss of data
while a write only adds extra data. That's a reason to allow writes
but not reads. This is exactly the opposite of the case for ordinary
files where you allow others to read the file but not write (modify)
it. Use of a port normally requires both read and write permissions.

A program that changes the device file attributes should undo these
changes when it exits. But if the exit is abnormal, then a device
file may be left in such a condition that it gives the error
"permission denied" when one attempts to use it again.

11. Communications Programs And Utilities

11.1. List of Software

Here is a list of some communication software you can choose from,
available via FTP, if they didn't come with your distribution.
� ecu - a communications program

� C-Kermit <http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/> - portable, scriptable,
serial and TCP/IP communications including file transfer,
character-set translation, and zmodem support

� minicom - telix-like communications program

� seyon - X based communication program

� xc - xcomm communication package

� term and SLiRP offer TCP/IP functionality using a shell account.

� screen is another multi-session program. This one behaves like the
virtual consoles.

� callback is where you dial out to a remote modem and then that
modem hangs up and calls you back (to save on phone bills).

� mgetty+fax handles FAX stuff, and provides an alternate ps_getty.

� ZyXEL is a control program for ZyXEL U-1496 modems. It handles
dialin, dialout, dial back security, FAXing, and voice mailbox
functions.

� SLIP and PPP software can be found at
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/network/serial.

11.2. kermit and zmodem

To use zmodem with kermit (for ttyS3), add the following to your
.kermrc:

define rz !rz < /dev/ttyS3 > /dev/ttyS3
define sz !sz \%0 > /dev/ttyS3 < /dev/ttyS3

Be sure to put in the correct port your modem is on. Then, to use it,
just type rz or sz <filename> at the kermit prompt.

12. Serial Tips And Miscellany

Here are some serial tips you might find helpful...

12.1. Line Drivers

For a text terminal, the EIA-232 speeds are fast enough but the usable
cable length is often too short. Balanced technology could fix this.
The common method of obtaining balanced communication with a text
terminal is to install 2@ line drivers in the serial line to convert
unbalanced to balanced (and conversely). They are a specialty item
and are expensive if purchased new.

12.2. Known Defective Hardware

12.2.1. Avoiding IO Address Conflicts with Certain Video Boards

The IO address of the IBM 8514 video board (and others) is allegedly
0x?2e8 where ? is 2, 4, 8, or 9. This may conflict (but shouldn't if
the serial port is well designed) with the IO address of ttyS3 at
0x02e8 if the serial port ignores the leading 0 hex digit when it
decodes the address (many do). That is bad news if you try to use
ttyS3 at this IO address. Another story is that Linux will not detect
your internal modem on ttyS3 but that you can use setserial to put
ttyS3 at this address and the modem will work fine.

12.2.2. Problem with AMD Elan SC400 CPU (PC-on-a-chip)

This has a race condition between an interrupt and a status register
of the UART. An interrupt is issued when the UART transmitter
finishes the transmission of a byte and the UART transmit buffer
becomes empty (waiting for the next byte). But a status register of
the UART doesn't get updated fast enough to reflect this. As a
result, the interrupt service routine rapidly checks and determines
(erroneously) that nothing has happened. Thus no byte is sent to the
port to be transmitted and the UART transmitter waits in vain for a
byte that never arrives. If the interrupt service routine had waited
just a bit longer before checking the status register, then it would
have been updated to reflect the true state and all would be OK.

There is a proposal to fix this by patching the serial driver. But
Should linux be patched to accommodate defective hardware, especially
if this patch may impair performance of good hardware?

13. Troubleshooting

See Modem-HOWTO for troubleshooting related to modems or getty for
modems.

13.1. Serial Electrical Test Equipment

13.1.1. Breakout Gadgets, etc.

While a multimeter (used as a voltmeter) may be all that you need for
just a few terminals, simple special test equipment has been made for
testing serial port lines. Some are called "breakout ... " where
breakout means to break out conductors from a cable. These gadgets
have a couple of connectors on them and insert into the serial cable.
Some have test points for connecting a voltmeter. Others have LED
lamps which light when certain modem control lines are asserted
(turned on). Still others have jumpers so that you can connect any
wire to any wire. Some have switches.

Radio Shack sells (in 1998) a "RS-232 Troubleshooter" or "RS-232 Line
Tester" which checks TD, RD, CD, RTS, CTS, DTR, and DSR. A green
light means on (+12 v) while red means off (-12 v). They also sell a
"RS-232 Serial Jumper Box" which permits connecting the pins anyway
you choose.

13.1.2. Measuring Voltages

Any voltmeter or multimeter, even the cheapest that sells for about
$10, should work fine. Trying to use other methods for checking
voltage is tricky. Don't use a LED unless it has a series resistor to
reduce the voltage across the LED. A 470 ohm resistor is used for a
20 ma LED (but not all LED's are 20 ma). The LED will only light for
a certain polarity so you may test for + or - voltages. Does anyone
make such a gadget for automotive circuit testing?? Logic probes may
be damaged if you try to use them since the TTL voltages for which
they are designed are only 5 volts. Trying to use a 12 V incandescent
light bulb is not a good idea. It won't show polarity and due to
limited output current of the UART it probably will not even light up.

To measure voltage on a female connector you may plug in a bent paper
clip into the desired opening. The paper clip's diameter should be no
larger than the pins so that it doesn't damage the contact. Clip an
alligator clip (or the like) to the paper clip to connect up.

13.1.3. Taste Voltage

As a last resort, if you have no test equipment and are willing to
risk getting shocked (or even electrocuted) you can always taste the
voltage. Before touching one of the test leads with your tongue, test
them to make sure that there is no high voltage on them. Touch both
leads (at the same time) to one hand to see if they shock you. Then
if no shock, wet the skin contact points by licking and repeat. If
this test gives you a shock, you certainly don't want to use your
tongue.

For the test for 12 V, Lick a finger and hold one test lead in it.
Put the other test lead on your tongue. If the lead on your tongue is
positive, there will be a noticeable taste. You might try this with
flashlight batteries first so you will know what taste to expect.

13.2. Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics

A few Linux programs will monitor the modem control lines and indicate
if they are positive (1) or negative (0). See section ``Serial
Monitoring/Diagnostics''

13.3. (The following subsections are in both the Serial and Modem
HOWTOs)

13.4. My Serial Port is Physically There but Can't be Found

If a device (such as a modem) give evidence of working, then the
serial port that it's on has been found. If it doesn't work at all,
then you need to make sure your serial port can be found.

Check the BIOS menus and BIOS messages. For the PCI bus use lspci or
scanpci. If it's an ISA bus PnP serial port, try "pnpdump --dumpregs"
and/or see Plug-and-Play-HOWTO. Using "scanport" will scan all ISA
bus ports and may discover an unknown port that could be a serial port
(but it doesn't probe the port). It could hang your PC. You may try
probing with setserial. See ``Probing''. If nothing seems to get
thru the port it may be accessible but have a bad interrupt. See
``Extremely Slow: Text appears on the screen slowly after long
delays''. Use setserial -g to see what the serial driver thinks and
check for IRQ and I0 address conflicts. Even if you see no conflicts
the driver may have incorrect information and conflicts may still
exist.

If two ports have the same IO address then probing it will erroneously
indicate only one port. Plug-and-play detection will find both ports
so this should only be a problem if at least one port is not plug-and-
play. All sorts of errors may be reported/observed for devices
illegally "sharing" a port but the fact that there are two devices on
the same a port doesn't seem to get detected (except hopefully by
you). In the above case, if the IRQs are different then probing for
IRQs with setserial might "detect" this situation by failing to detect
any IRQ. See ``Probing''.

13.5. Extremely Slow: Text appears on the screen slowly after long
delays

It's likely mis-set/conflicting interrupts. Here are some of the
symptoms which will happen the first time you try to use a modem,
terminal, or printer. In some cases you type something but nothing
appears on the screen until many seconds later. Only the last
character typed may show up. It may be just an invisible <return>
character so all you notice is that the cursor jumps down one line.
In other cases where a lot of data should appear on the screen, only a
batch of about 16 characters appear. Then there is a long wait of
many seconds for the next batch of characters. You might also get
"input overrun" error messages (or find them in logs).

For more details on the symptoms and why this happens see

``Interrupt Problem Details'' and/or ``Interrupt Conflicts'' and/or
``Mis-set Interrupts''. If it involves Plug-and-Play devices, see
also Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.

As a quick check to see if it really is an interrupt problem, set the
IRQ to 0 with "setserial". This will tell the driver to use polling
instead of interrupts. If this seems to fix the "slow" problem then
you had an interrupt problem. You should still try to solve the
problem since polling uses excessive computer resources and sometimes
drastically decreases your thruput.

Checking to find the interrupt conflict may not be easy since Linux
supposedly doesn't permit any interrupt conflicts and will send you a
``/dev/ttyS?: Device or resource busy'' error message if it thinks you
are attempting to create a conflict. But a real conflict can be
created if "setserial" has incorrect information. Thus using
"setserial" will not reveal the conflict (nor will looking at
/proc/interrupts which bases its info on "setserial"). You still need
to know what "setserial" thinks so that you can pinpoint where it's
wrong and change it when you determine what's really set in the
hardware.

What you need to do is to check how the hardware is set by checking
jumpers or using PnP software to check how the hardware is actually
set. For PnP run either "pnpdump --dumpregs" (if ISA bus) or run
"lspci" (if PCI bus). Compare this to how Linux (e.g. "setserial")
thinks the hardware is set.

13.6. Somewhat Slow: I expected it to be a few times faster

One reason may be that whatever is on the serial port (such as a
modem, terminal, printer) doesn't work as fast as you thought it did.

Another possible reason is that the serial driver thinks you have an
obsolete serial port (UART 8250,16450 or early 16550). See ``What Are
UARTs?''. Use "setserial -g /dev/ttyS*". If it shows anything less
than a 16550A, this is likely your problem. Then if "setserial" has
it wrong, change it. See ``What is Setserial'' for more info. Of
course if you really do have an obsolete serial port, lying about it
to setserial will only make things worse.

13.7. The Startup Screen Show Wrong IRQs for the Serial Ports.

Linux does not do any IRQ detection on startup. When the serial
module loads it only does serial device detection. Thus, disregard
what it says about the IRQ, because it's just assuming the standard
IRQs. This is done, because IRQ detection is unreliable, and can be
fooled. But if and when setserial runs from a start-up script, it
changes the IRQ's and displays the new (and hopefully correct) state
on on the startup screen. If the wrong IRQ is not corrected by a
later display on the screen, then you've got a problem.

So, even though I have my ttyS2 set at IRQ 5, I still see

ttyS02 at 0x03e8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A

at first when Linux boots. (Older kernels may show "ttyS02" as
"tty02") You have to use setserial to tell Linux the IRQ you are
using.

13.8. "Cannot open /dev/ttyS?: Permission denied"

Check the file permissions on this port with "ls -l /dev/ttyS?"_ If
you own the ttyS? then you need read and write permissions: crw with
the c (Character device) in col. 1. It you don't own it then it
should show rw- in cols. 8 & 9 which means that everyone has read and
write permission on it. Use "chmod" to change permissions. There are
more complicated ways to get access like belonging to a "group" that
has group permission.

13.9. "Operation not supported by device" for ttyS?

This means that an operation requested by setserial, stty, etc.
couldn't be done because the kernel doesn't support doing it.
Formerly this was often due to the "serial" module not being loaded.
But with the advent of PnP, it may likely mean that there is no modem
(or other serial device) at the address where the driver (and
setserial) thinks it is. If there is no modem there, commands (for
operations) sent to that address obviously don't get done. See ``What
is set in my serial port hardware?''

If the "serial" module wasn't loaded but "lsmod" shows you it's now
loaded it might be the case that it's loaded now but wasn't loaded
when you got the error message. In many cases the module will
automatically loaded when needed (if it can be found). To force
loading of the "serial" module it may be listed in the file:
/etc/modules.conf or /etc/modules. The actual module should reside
in: /lib/modules/.../misc/serial.o.

13.10. "Cannot create lockfile. Sorry"

When a port is "opened" by a program a lockfile is created in
/var/lock/. Wrong permissions for the lock directory will not allow a
lockfile to be created there. Use "ls -ld /var/lock" to see if the
permissions are OK: usually rwx for everyone (repeated 3 times). If
it's wrong, use "chmod" to fix it. Of course, if there is no "lock"
directory no lockfile can be created there. For more info on
lockfiles see ``What Are Lock Files''

13.11. "Device /dev/ttyS? is locked."

This means that someone else (or some other process) is supposedly
using the serial port. There are various ways to try to find out what
process is "using" it. One way is to look at the contents of the
lockfile (/var/lock/LCK...). It should be the process id. If the
process id is say 261 type "ps 261" to find out what it is. Then if
the process is no longer needed, it may be gracefully killed by "kill
261". If it refuses to be killed use "kill -9 261" to force it to be
killed, but then the lockfile will not be removed and you'll need to
delete it manually. Of course if there is no such process as 161 then
you may just remove the lockfile but in most cases the lockfile should
have been automatically removed if it contained a stale process id
(such as 261).

13.12. "/dev/ttyS?: Device or resource busy"

This means that the device you are trying to access (or use) is
supposedly busy (in use) or that a resource it needs (such as an IRQ)
is supposedly being used by another device. Sometimes it actually is
"busy" but in other cases it erroneously appears to be "busy".

The ``resource busy'' part often means (example for ttyS2) ``You can't
use ttyS2 since another device is using ttyS2's interrupt.'' The
potential interrupt conflict is inferred from what "setserial" thinks.
A more accurate error message would be ``Can't use ttyS2 since the
setserial data (and kernel data) indicates that another device is
using ttyS2's interrupt''. If two devices use the same IRQ and you
start up only one of the devices, everything is OK because there is no
conflict yet. But when you next try to start the second device
(without quitting the first device) you get a "... resource busy"
error message. This is because the kernel only keeps track of what
IRQs are actually in use and conflicts don't happen unless the devices
are in use (open).

There are two possible cases when you see this message:

1. There may be a real interrupt conflict that is being avoided.

2. Setserial has it wrong and the only reason ttyS2 can't be used is
that setserial erroneously predicts a conflict.

What you need to do is to find the interrupt setserial thinks ttyS2 is
using. This is easier said than done since you can't use the
"setserial" command for ttyS2 since the IRQ for ttyS2 is supposedly
"busy" and you will get the same "... busy" error message. To fix
this either reboot or: exit or gracefully kill all likely conflicting
processes. If you reboot: 1. Watch the boot-time messages for the
serial ports. 2. Hope that the file that runs "setserial" at boot-
time doesn't (by itself) create the same conflict again.

If you think you know what IRQ ttyS2 is using then you may look at
/proc/interrupts to find what else (besides another serial port) is
currently using this IRQ. You might also want to double check that
any suspicious IRQs shown here (and by "setserial") are correct (the
same as set in the hardware). A way to test whether or not it is a
potential interrupt conflict is to set the IRQ to 0 (polling) using
"setserial". Then if the busy message goes away, it was likely a
potential interrupt conflcit. It's not a good idea to leave it
permanently set at 0 since more CPU resources will be used.

13.13. Troubleshooting Tools

These are some of the programs you might want to use in
troubleshooting:

� "lsof /dev/ttyS*" will list serial ports which are open.

� "setserial" shows and sets the low-level hardware configuration of
a port (what the driver thinks it is). See ``What is Setserial''

� "stty" shows and sets the configuration of a port (except for that
handled by "setserial"). See the section ``Stty''

� "modemstat" or "statserial" will show the current state of various
modem signal lines (such as DTR, CTS, etc.)

� "irqtune" will give serial port interrupts higher priority to
improve performance.

� "hdparm" for hard-disk tuning may help some more.

� "lspci" shows the actual IRQs, etc. of hardware on the PCI bus.

� "pnpdump --dumpregs" shows the actual IRQs, etc. of hardware for
PnP devices on the ISA bus.

� Some "files" in the /proc tree (such as ioports and interrupts).

14. Interrupt Problem Details

While the section ``Troubleshooting'' lists problems by symptom, this
section explains what will happen if interrupts are set incorrectly.
This section helps you understand what caused the symptom, what other
symptoms might be due to the same problem, and what to do about it.

14.1. Types of interrupt problems

The "setserial" program will show you how serial driver thinks the
interrupts are set. If the serial driver (and setserial) has it right
then everything regarding interrupts should be OK. Of course a
/dev/ttyS must exist for the device and Plug-and-Play (or jumpers)
must have set an address and IRQ in the hardware. Linux will not
knowingly permit an interrupt conflict and you will get a "Device or
resource busy" error message if you attempt to do something that would
create a conflict.

Since the kernel tries to avoid interrupt conflicts and gives you the
"resource busy" message if you try to create a conflict, how can
interrupt conflicts happen? Easy. "setserial" may have it wrong and
erroneously predicts no conflict when there will actually be a real
conflict based on what is set in the hardware. When this happens
there will be no "... busy" message but performance will be extremely
slow. Both devices will send identical interrupt signals on the same
wire and the CPU will erroneously think that the interrupts only come
from one device. This will be explained in detail in the following
sections.

Linux doesn't complain when you assign two devices the same IRQ
provided that neither device is in use. As each device starts up
(initializes), it asks Linux for permission to use its hardware
interrupt. Linux keeps track of which interrupt is assigned to whom,
and if your interrupt is already in use, you'll see this "... busy"
error message. Thus if two devices use the same IRQ and you start up
only one of the devices, everything is OK. But when you next try to
start the second device (without quitting the first device) you get
"... busy" error message.

14.2. Symptoms of Mis-set or Conflicting Interrupts

The symptoms depend on whether or not you have a modern serial port
with FIFO buffers or an obsolete serial port without FIFO buffers.
It's important to understand the symptoms for the obsolete ones also
since sometimes modern ports seem to behave that way.

For the obsolete serial ports, only one character gets thru every
several seconds. This is so slow that it seems almost like nothing is
working (especially if the character that gets thru is invisible (such
a space or newline). For the modern ports with FIFO buffers you will
likely see bursts of up to 16 characters every several seconds.

If you have a modem on the port and dial a number, it seemingly may
not connect since the CONNECT message may not make it thru. But after
a long wait it may finally connect and you may see part of a login
message (or the like). The response from your side of the connection
may be so delayed that the other side gives up and disconnects you,
resulting in a NO CARRIER message.

If you use minicom, a common test to see if things are working is to
type the simplest "AT" command and see if the modem responds. Typing
just at<enter> should normally (if interrupts are OK) result in an
immediate "OK" response from the modem. With bad interrupts you type
at<enter> and may see nothing. But then after 10 seconds or so you
see the cursor drop down one line. What is going on is that the FIFO
is behaving like it can only hold one byte. The "at" you typed caused
it to overrun and both letters were lost. But the final <enter> got
thru since you waited for it and you "see" this invisible character by
noting that the cursor jumped down one line. If you were to type a
single letter and then wait about 10 seconds, you should see it echo
back to the screen. This is fine if your typing speed is less that
one word per minute :-)

14.3. Mis-set Interrupts

If you don't understand what an interrupt does see ``Interrupts''. If
a serial port has one IRQ set in the hardware but a different one set
in the device driver, the device driver will not catch any interrupts
sent by the serial port. Since the serial port uses interrupts to
call its driver to service the port (fetching bytes from its 16-byte
receive buffer or putting another 16-bytes in its transmit buffer) one
might expect that the serial port would not work at all.

But it still may work anyway --sort of. Why? Well, besides the
interrupt method of servicing the port there's a slow polling method
that doesn't need interrupts. The way it works is that every so often
the device driver checks the serial port to see if it needs anything
such as if it has some bytes that need fetching from its receive
buffer. If interrupts don't work, the serial driver falls back to
this polling method. But this polling method was not intended to be
used a substitute for interrupts. It's so slow that it's not
practical to use and may cause buffer overruns. Its purpose may have
been to get things going again if just one interrupt is lost or fails
to do the right thing. It's also useful in showing you that
interrupts have failed.

For the 16-byte transmit buffer, 16 bytes will be transmitted and then
it will wait until the next polling takes place (several seconds
later) before the next 16 bytes are sent out. Thus transmission is
very slow and in small chunks. Receiving is slow too since bytes that
are received by the receive buffer are likely to remain there for
several seconds until it is polled.

This explains why it takes so long before you see what you typed.
When you type say AT to a modem, the AT goes out the serial port to
the modem. The modem then echos the AT back thru the serial port to
the screen. Thus the AT characters have to pass twice thru the serial
port. Normally this happens so fast that AT seems to appear on the
screen at the same time you hit the keys on the keyboard. With
polling delays thru the serial port, you don't see what you typed
until many seconds later.

What about overruns of the 16-byte receive buffer? This will happen
with an external modem since the modem just sends to the serial port
at high speed which is likely to overrun the 16-byte buffer. But for
an internal modem, the serial port is on the same card and it's likely
to check that this receive buffer has room for more bytes before
putting received bytes into it. In this case there will be no overrun
of this receive buffer, but text will just appear on your screen in
16-byte chunks spaced at intervals of several seconds.

Even with an external modem you might not get overruns. If just a few
characters (under 16) are sent you don't get overruns since the buffer
likely has room for them. But attempts to send a larger number of
bytes from your modem to your screen may result in overruns. However,
more than 16 (with no gaps) can get thru without overruns if the
timing is right. For example, suppose a burst of 32 bytes is sent
into the port from the external cable. The polling might just happen
after the first 16 bytes came in so it would pick up these 16 bytes
OK. Then there would be space for the next 16 bytes so that entire 32
bytes gets thru OK. While this scenario is not very likely, similar
cases where 17 to 31 bytes make thru are more likely. But it's even
more likely that only an occasional 16-byte chunk will get thru with
possible loss of data.

If you have an obsolete serial port with only a 1-byte buffer (or it's
been incorrectly set to work like a 1-byte buffer) then the situation
will be much worse than described above and only one character will
occasionally make it thru the port. Every character received causes
an overrun (and is lost) except for the last character received. This
character is likely to be just a line-feed since this is often the
last character to be transmitted in a burst of characters sent to your
screen. Thus you may type AT<return> to the modem but never see AT on
the screen. All you see several seconds later is that the cursor
drops down one line (a line feed). This has happened to me with a
16-byte FIFO buffer that was behaving like a 1-byte buffer.

When a communication program starts up, it expects interrupts to be
working. It's not geared to using this slow polling-like mode of
operation. Thus all sorts of mistakes may be made such as setting up
the serial port and/or modem incorrectly. It may fail to realize when
a connection has been made. If a script is being used for login, it
may fail (caused by timeout) due to the polling delays.

14.4. Interrupt Conflicts

When two devices have the same IRQ number it's called sharing
interrupts. Under some conditions this sharing works out OK.
Starting with kernel version 2.2, serial ports may, in some cases,
share interrupts with other serial ports. Devices on the PCI bus may
share the same IRQ interrupt with other devices on the PCI bus. In
other cases where there is potential for conflict, there should be no
problem if no two devices with the same IRQ are ever "in use" at the
same time. More precisely, "in use" really means "open" (in
programmer jargon). In cases other than the exceptions mentioned
above (unless special software and hardware permit sharing), sharing
is not allowed and conflicts arise if sharing is attempted.

Even if two processes with conflicting IRQs run at the same time, one
of the devices will likely have its interrupts caught by its device
driver and may work OK. The other device will not have its interrupts
caught by the correct driver and will likely behave just like a
process with mis-set interrupts. See ``Mis-set Interrupts'' for more
details.

14.5. Resolving Interrupt Problems

If you are getting a very slow response as described above, then one
test is to change the IRQ to 0 (uses fast polling instead of
interrupts) and see if the problem goes away. Note that the polling
due to IRQ=0 is orders of magnitude faster than the slow "polling" due
to bad interrupts. If IRQ=0 seems to fix the problem, then there was
likely something wrong with the interrupts. Using IRQ=0 is very
resource intensive and is only a temporary fix. You should try to
find the cause of the interrupt problem and not permanently use IRQ=0.

Check /proc/interrupts to see if the IRQ is currently in use by
another process. If it's in use by another serial port you could try
"top" (type f and then enable the TTY display) or "ps -e" to find out
which serial ports are in use. If you suspect that setserial has a
wrong IRQ then see ``What is the current IO address and IRQ of my
Serial Port ?''

15. What Are UARTs? How Do They Affect Performance?

15.1. Introduction to UARTS

(This section is also in the Modem-HOWTO) UARTs (Universal
Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) are serial chips on your PC
motherboard (or on an internal modem card). The UART function may
also be done on a chip that does other things as well. On older
computers like many 486's, the chips were on the disk IO controller
card. Still older computer have dedicated serial boards.

The UART's purpose is to convert bytes from the PC's parallel bus to a
serial bit-stream. The cable going out of the serial port is serial
and has only one wire for each direction of flow. The serial port
sends out a stream of bits, one bit at a time. Conversely, the bit
stream that enters the serial port via the external cable is converted
to parallel bytes that the computer can understand. UARTs deal with
data in byte sized pieces, which is conveniently also the size of
ASCII characters.

Say you have a terminal hooked up to your PC. When you type a
character, the terminal gives that character to its transmitter (also
a UART). The transmitter sends that byte out onto the serial line,
one bit at a time, at a specific rate. On the PC end, the receiving
UART takes all the bits and rebuilds the (parallel) byte and puts it
in a buffer.

Along with converting between serial and parallel, the UART does some
other things as a byproduct (side effect) of its primary task. The
voltage used to represent bits is also converted (changed). Extra
bits (called start and stop bits) are added to each byte before it is
transmitted. See the Serial-HOWTO section, ``Voltage Waveshapes'' for
details. Also, while the flow rate (in bytes/sec) on the parallel bus
inside the computer is very high, the flow rate out the UART on the
serial port side of it is much lower. The UART has a fixed set of
rates (speeds) which it can use at its serial port interface.

15.2. Two Types of UARTs

There are two basic types of UARTs: dumb UARTS and FIFO UARTS. Dumb
UARTs are the 8250, 16450, early 16550, and early 16650. They are
obsolete but if you understand how they work it's easy to understand
how the modern ones work with FIFO UARTS ( late 16550, 16550A, 16c552,
late 16650, 16750, and 16C950).

There is some confusion regarding 16550. Early models had a bug and
worked properly only as 16450's (no FIFO). Later models with the bug
fixed were named 16550A but many manufacturers did not accept the name
change and continued calling it a 16550. Most all 16550's in use
today are like 16550A's. Linux will report it as being a 16550A even
though your hardware manual (or a label note) says it's a 16550. A
similar situation exists for the 16650 (only it's worse since the
manufacturer allegedly didn't admit anything was wrong). Linux will
report a late 16650 as being a 16650V2. If it reports it as 16650 it
is bad news and only is used as if it had a one-byte buffer.

15.3. FIFOs

To understand the differences between dumb and FIFO (First In, First
Out queue discipline) first let's examine what happens when a UART has
sent or received a byte. The UART itself can't do anything with the
data passing thru it, it just receives and sends it. For the original
dumb UARTS, the CPU gets an interrupt from the serial device every
time a byte has been sent or received. The CPU then moves the
received byte out of the UART's buffer and into memory somewhere, or
gives the UART another byte to send. The 8250 and 16450 UARTs only
have a 1 byte buffer. That means, that every time 1 byte is sent or
received, the CPU is interrupted. At low transfer rates, this is OK.
But, at high transfer rates, the CPU gets so busy dealing with the
UART, that is doesn't have time to adequately tend to other tasks. In
some cases, the CPU does not get around to servicing the interrupt in
time, and the byte is overwritten, because they are coming in so fast.
This is called an "overrun" or "overflow".

That's where the FIFO UARTs are useful. The 16550A (or 16550) FIFO
chip comes with 16 byte FIFO buffers. This means that it can receive
up to 14 bytes (or send 16 bytes) before it has to interrupt the CPU.
Not only can it wait for more bytes, but the CPU then can transfer all
14 (or more) bytes at a time. This is a significant advantage over
the other UARTs, which only have 1 byte buffers. The CPU receives
less interrupts, and is free to do other things. Data is not lost,
and everyone is happy. Note that the interrupt threshold of FIFO
buffers (trigger level) may be set at less than 14. 1, 4 and 8 are
other possible choices.

While most PC's only have a 16550 with 16-byte buffers, better UARTS
have even larger buffers. Note that the interrupt is issued slightly
before the buffer get full (at say a "trigger level" of 14 bytes for a
16-byte buffer). This allows room for a few more bytes to be received
during the time that the interrupt is being serviced. The trigger
level may be set to various permitted values by kernel software. A
trigger level of 1 will be almost like a dumb UART (except that it
still has room for 15 more bytes after it issues the interrupt).

If you type something while visiting a BBS, the characters you type go
out thru the serial port. Your typed characters that you see on the
screen are what was echoed back thru the telephone line thru your
modem and then thru your serial port to the screen. If you had a
16-byte buffer on the serial port which held back characters until it
had 14 of them, you would need to type many characters before you
could see what you typed (before they appeared on the screen). This
would be very confusing but there is a "timeout" to prevent this.
Thus you normally see a character on the screen just as soon as you
type it.

The "timeout" works like this for the receive UART buffer: If
characters arrive one after another, then an interrupt is issued only
when say the 14th character reaches the buffer. But if a character
arrives and the next character doesn't arrive soon thereafter, then an
interrupt is issued. This happens even though there are not 14
characters in the buffer (there may only be one character in it).
Thus when what you type goes thru this buffer, it acts almost like a
1-byte buffer even though it is actually a 16-byte buffer (unless your
typing speed is a hundred times faster than normal). There is also
"timeout" for the transmit buffer as well.

15.4. UART Model Numbers

Here's a list of UARTs. TL is Trigger Level

� 8250, 16450, early 16550: Obsolete with 1-byte buffers

� 16550, 16550A, 16c552: 16-byte buffers, TL=1,4,8,14

� 16650: 32-byte buffers. Speed up to 460.8 kbps

� 16750: 64-byte buffer for send, 56-byte for receive. Speed up to
921.6 kbps

� Hayes ESP: 1k-byte buffers.

The obsolete ones are only good for modems no higher than 14.4k (DTE
speeds up to 38400 bps). For modern modems you need at least a 16550
(and not an early 16550). For V.90 56k modems, it may be a several
percent faster with a 16650 (especially if you are downloading
uncompressed files). The main advantage of the 16650 is its larger
buffer size as the extra speed isn't needed unless the modem
compression ratio is high. Some 56k internal modems may come with a
16650 ??

Non-UART, and intelligent multiport boards use DSP chips to do
additional buffering and control, thus relieving the CPU even more.
For example, the Cyclades Cyclom, and Stallion EasyIO boards use a
Cirrus Logic CD1400 RISC UART, and many boards use 80186 CPUs or even
special RISC CPUs, to handle the serial IO.

Most newer PC's (486's, Pentiums, or better) come with 16550A's
(usually called just 16550's). If you have something really old the
chip may unplug so that you may be able to upgrade by buying a 16550A
chip and replacing your existing 16450 UART. If the functionality has
been put on another type of chip, you are out of luck. If the UART is
socketed, then upgrading is easy (if you can find a replacement). The
new and old are pin-to-pin compatible. It may be more feasible to
just buy a new serial board on the Internet (few retail stores stock
them today).

16. Pinout and Signals

16.1. Pinout

PINOUT of the SERIAL PORT (--> direction is out of PC)
(Note DCD is sometimes labeled CD)
Pin # Pin # Acronym Full-Name Direction What-it-May-Do/Mean
9-pin 25-pin
3 2 TxD Transmit Data --> Transmits byte out of PC
2 3 RxD Receive Data <-- Receives bytes into PC
7 4 RTS Request To Send --> RTS/CTS flow control
8 5 CTS Clear To Send <-- RTS/CTS flow control
6 6 DSR Data Set Ready <-- I'm ready to communicate
4 20 DTR Data Terminal Ready--> I'm ready to communicate
1 8 DCD Data Carrier Detect<-- Modem connected to another
9 22 RI Ring Indicator <-- Telephone line ringing
5 7 Signal Ground

16.2. Signals May Have No Fixed Meaning

Only 3 of the 9 pins have a fixed assignment: transmit, receive and
signal ground. This is fixed by the hardware and you can't change it.
But the other signal lines are controlled by software and may do (and
mean) almost anything at all. However they can only be in one of two
states: asserted (+12 volts) or negated (-12 volts). Asserted is "on"
and negated is "off". For example, Linux software may command that
DTR be negated and the hardware only carries out this command and puts
-12 volts on the DTR pin. A modem (or other device) that receives
this DTR signal may do various things. If a modem has been configured
a certain way it will hang-up the telephone line when DTR is negated.
In other cases it may ignore this signal or do something else when DTR
is negated (turned off).

It's like this for all the 6 signal lines. The hardware only sends
and receives the signals, but what action (if any) they perform is up
to the Linux software and the configuration/design of devices that you
connect to the serial port. However, most pins have certain functions
which they normally perform but this may vary with the operating
system and the device driver configuration. Under Linux, one may
modify the source code to make these signal lines behave differently
(some people have).

16.3. Cabling Between Serial Ports

A cable from a serial port always connects to another serial port. A
modem or other device that connects to the serial port has a serial
port built into it. For modems, the cable is always straight thru:
pin 2 goes to pin 2, etc. The modem is said to be DCE (Data
Communications Equipment) and the computer is said to be DTE (Data
Terminal Equipment). Thus for connecting DTE-to-DCE you use straight-
thru cable. For connecting DTE-to-DTE you must use a null-modem cable
and there are many ways to wire such cable (see examples in Text-
Terminal-HOWTO subsection: "Direct Cable Connection")

There are good reasons why it works this way. One reason is that the
signals are unidirectional. If pin 2 sends a signal out of it (but is
unable to receive any signal) then obviously you can't connect it to
pin 2 of the same type of device. If you did, they would both send
out signals on the same wire to each other but neither would be able
to receive any signal. There are two ways to deal with this
situation. One way is to have a two different types of equipment
where pin 2 of the first type sends the signal to pin 2 of the second
type (which receives the signal). That's the way it's done when you
connect a PC (DTE) to a modem (DCE). There's a second way to do this
without having two different types of equipment: Connect pin sending
pin 2 to a receiving pin 3 on same type of equipment. That's the way
it's done when you connect 2 PC's together or a PC to a terminal (DTE-
to-DTE). The cable used for this is called a null-modem cable. The
above example is for a 25 pin connector but for a 9-pin connector the
pin numbers are just the opposite.

The serial pin designations were originally intended for connecting a
dumb terminal to a modem. The terminal was DTE (Data Terminal
Equipment) and the modem was DCE (Data Communication Equipment).
Today the PC is usually used as DTE instead of a terminal (but real
terminals may still be used this way). The names of the pins are the
same on both DTE and DCE. The words: "receive" and "transmit" are in
this case from the point of view of the PC (DTE). The transmit pin
from the PC transmits to the "transmit" pin of the modem (but actually
the modem is receiving the data from this pin so from the point of
view of the modem it would be a receive pin).

The serial port was originally intended to be used for connecting DTE
to DCE which makes cabling simple: just use a straight-thru cable.
Thus when one connects a modem one seldom needs to worry about which
pin is which. But people wanted to connect DTE to DTE (for example a
computer to a terminal) and various ways were found to do this by
fabricating various type of special cables. In this case what pin
connects to what pin becomes more important.

16.4. RTS/CTS and DTR/DSR Flow Control

This is "hardware" flow control. Flow control was previously
explained in the ``Flow Control'' subsection but the pins and voltage
signals were not. Linux only supports RTS/CTS flow control at present
(but a special driver may exist for a specific application which
supports DTR/DSR flow control). Only RTS/CTS flow control will be
discussed since DTR/DSR flow control works the same way. To get
RTS/CTS flow control one needs to either select hardware flow control
in an application program or use the command:
stty crtscts < /dev/ttyS2 (or the like). This enables RTS/CTS
hardware flow control in the Linux device driver.

Then when a DTE (such as a PC) wants to stop the flow into it, it
negates RTS. Negated "Request To Send" (-12 volts) means "Request NOT
To Send to me" (stop sending). When the PC is ready for more bytes it
asserts RTS (+12 volts) and the flow of bytes to it resumes. Flow
control signals are always sent in a direction opposite to the flow of
bytes that is being controlled. DCE equipment (modems) works the same
way but sends the stop signal out the CTS pin. Thus it's RTS/CTS flow
control using 2 lines.

On what pins is this stop signal received? That depends on whether we
have a DCE-DTE connection or a DTE-DTE connection. For DCE-DTE it's a
straight-thru connection so obviously the signal is received on a pin
with the same name as the pin it's sent out from. It's RTS-->RTS (PC
to modem) and CTS<--CTS (modem to PC). For DTE-to-DTE the connection
is also easy to figure out. The RTS pin always sends and the CTS pin
always receives. Assume that we connect two PCs (PC1 and PC2)
together via their serial ports. Then it's RTS(PC1)-->CTS(PC2) and
CTS(PC1)<--RTS(PC2). In other words RTS and CTS cross over. Such a
cable (with other signals crossed over as well) is called a "null
modem" cable. See ``Cabling Between Serial Ports''

What is sometimes confusing is that there is the original use of RTS
where it means about the opposite of the previous explanation above.
This original meaning is: I Request To Send to you. This request was
intended to be sent from a terminal (or computer) to a modem which, if
it decided to grant the request, would send back an asserted CTS from
its CTS pin to the CTS pin of the computer: You are Cleared To Send to
me. Note that in contrast to the modern RTS/CTS bi-directional flow
control, this only protects the flow in one direction: from the
computer (or terminal) to the modem. This original use appears to be
little used today on modern equipment (including modems).

16.4.1. The DTR and DSR Pins

Just like RTS and CTS, these pins are paired. For DTE-to-DTE
connections they are likely to cross over. There are two ways to use
these pins. One way is to use them as a substitute for RTS/CTS flow
control. The DTR pin is just like the RTS pin while the DSR pin
behaves like the CTS pin. Although Linux doesn't support DTR/DSR flow
control, it can be obtained by connecting the RTS/CTS pins at the PC
to the DSR/DTR pins at the device that uses DTR/DSR flow control. DTR
flow control is the same as DTR/DSR flow control but it's only one-way
and the DSR pin is not used. Many text terminals and some printers
use this type of flow control.

The normal use of DTR and DSR is as follows: A device asserting DTR
says that its powered on and ready to operate. For a modem, the
meaning of a DTR signal from the PC depends on how the modem is
configured. To send a DTR signal manually from a PC using the stty
command set the baud rate to 0. Negating DTR is sometimes called
"hanging up" but it doesn't always do this.

16.5. Preventing a Port From Opening

If "stty -clocal" (or getty is used with the "local" flag negated)
then a serial port can't open until DCD gets an assert (+12 volts)
signal.

17. Voltage Waveshapes

17.1. Voltage for a Bit

At the EIA-232 serial port, voltages are bipolar (positive or negative
with respect to ground) and should be about 12 volts in magnitude
(some are 5 or 10 volts). For the transmit and receive pins +12
volts is a 0-bit (sometimes called "space") and -12 volts is a 1-bit
(sometimes called "mark"). This is known as inverted logic since
normally a 0-bit is both false and negative while a one is normally
both true and positive. Although the receive and transmit pins are
inverted logic, other pins (modem control lines) are normal logic with
a positive voltage being true (or "on" or "asserted") and a negative
voltage being false (or "off" or "negated"). Zero voltage has no
meaning (except it usually means that the unit is powered off).

A range of voltages is allowed. The specs say the magnitude of a
transmitted signal should be between 5 and 15 volts but must never
exceed 25 V. Any voltage received under 3 V is undefined (but some
devices will accept a lower voltage as valid). One sometimes sees
erroneous claims that the voltage is commonly 5 volts (or even 3
volts) but it's usually 11-12 volts. If you are using a EIA-422 port
on a Mac computer as an EIA-232 (requires a special cable) or EIA-423
then the voltage will actually be only 5 V. The discussion here
assumes 12 V.

Note that normal computer logic normally is just a few volts (5 volts
was once the standard) so that if you try to use test equipment
designed for testing 3-5 volt computer logic (TTL) on the 12 volts of
a serial port, it may damage the test equipment.

17.2. Voltage Sequence for a Byte

The transmit pin (TxD) is held at -12 V (mark) at idle when nothing is
being sent. To start a byte it jumps to +12 V (space) for the start
bit and remains at +12 V for the duration (period) of the start bit.
Next comes the low-order bit of the data byte. If it's a 0-bit
nothing changes and the line remains at +12 V for another bit-period.
If it's a 1-bit the voltage jumps from +12 to -12 V. After that comes
the next bit (-12 V if a 1 or +12 V if a 0), etc., etc. After the
last data bit a parity bit may be sent and then a -12 V (mark) stop
bit. Then the line remains at -12 V (idle) until the next start bit.
Note that there is no return to 0 volts and thus there is no simple
way (except by a synchronizing signal) to tell where one bit ends and
the next one begins for the case where 2 consecutive bits are the same
polarity (both zero or both one).

A 2nd stop bit would also be -12 V, just the same as the first stop
bit. Since there is no signal to mark the boundaries between these
bits, the only effect of the 2nd stop bit is that the line must remain
at -12 V idle twice as long. The receiver has no way of detecting the
difference between a 2nd stop bit and a longer idle time between
bytes. Thus communications works OK if one end uses one stop bit and
the other end uses 2 stop bits, but using only one stop bit is
obviously faster. In rare cases 1 1/2 stop bits are used. This means
that the line is kept at -12 V for 1 1/2 time periods (like a stop bit
50% wider than normal).

17.3. Parity Explained

Characters are normally transmitted with either 7 or 8 bits of data.
An additional parity bit may (or may not) be appended to this
resulting in a byte length of 7, 8 or 9 bits. Some terminal emulators
and older terminals do not allow 9 bits. Some prohibit 9 bits if 2
stop bits are used (since this would make the total number of bits too
large: 12 bits total after adding the start bit).

The parity may be set to odd, even or none (mark and space parity may
be options on some terminals or other serial devices). With odd
parity, the parity bit is selected so that the number of 1-bits in a
byte, including the parity bit, is odd. If a such a byte gets
corrupted by a bit being flipped, the result is an illegal byte of
even parity. This error will be detected and if it's an incoming byte
to the terminal an error-character symbol will appear on the screen.
Even parity works in a similar manner with all legal bytes (including
the parity bit) having an even number of 1-bits. During set-up, the
number of bits per character usually means only the number of data
bits per byte (7 for true ASCII and 8 for various ISO character sets).

A "mark" is a 1-bit (or logic 1) and a "space" is a 0-bit (or logic
0). For mark parity, the parity bit is always a one-bit. For space
parity it's always a zero-bit. Mark or space parity (also known as
"sticky parity") only wastes bandwidth and should be avoided if
feasible. The stty command can't set sticky parity but it's supported
by serial hardware and can be dealt with by programming in C. "No
parity" means that no parity bit is added. For terminals that don't
permit 9 bit bytes, "no parity" must be selected when using 8 bit
character sets since there is no room for a parity bit.

17.4. Forming a Byte (Framing)

In serial transmission of bytes via EIA-232 ports, the low-order bit
is always sent first. Serial ports on PC's use asynchronous
communication where there is a start bit and a stop bit to mark the
beginning and end of a byte. This is called framing and the framed
byte is sometimes called a frame. As a result a total of 9, 10, or 11
bits are sent per byte with 10 being the most common. 8-N-1 means 8
data bits, No parity, 1 stop bit. This adds up to 10 bits total when
one counts the start bit. One stop bit is almost universally used.
At 110 bits/sec (and sometimes at 300 bits/sec) 2 stop bits were once
used but today the 2nd stop bit is used only in very unusual
situations (or by mistake since it still works OK that way but wastes
bandwidth).

17.5. How "Asynchronous" is Synchronized

The EIA-232 serial port as implemented on PC is asynchronous which in
effect means that there is no "clock" signal sent with "ticks" to mark
when each bit is sent.. There are only two states of the transmit (or
receive) wire: mark (-12 V) or space (+12 V). There is no state of 0
V. Thus a sequence of 1-bits is transmitted by just a steady -12 V
with no markers of any kind between bits. For the receiver to detect
individual bits it must always have a clock signal which is in
synchronization with the transmitter clock. Such a clock would
generate a "tick" in synchronization with each transmitted (or
received) bit.

For asynchronous transmission, synchronization is achieved by framing
each byte with a start bit and a stop bit (done by hardware). The
receiver listens on the negative line for a positive start bit and
when it detects one it starts its clock ticking. It uses this clock
tick to time the reading of the next 7, 8 or 9 bits. (It actually is
a little more complex than this since several samples of a bit are
normally taken and this requires additional timing ticks.) Then the
stop bit is read, the clock stops and the receiver waits for the next
start bit. Thus async is actually synchronized during the reception
of a single byte but there is no synchronization between one byte and
the next byte.

18. Other Serial Devices (not async EIA-232)

18.1. Successors to EIA-232

A number of EIA standards have been established for higher speeds and
longer distances using twisted-pair (balanced) technology. Balanced
transmission can sometimes be a hundred times faster than unbalanced
EIA-232. For a given speed, the distance (maximum cable length) may
be many times longer with twisted pair. But PC-s keep being made with
the "obsolete" EIA-232 since it works OK with modems and mice since
the cable length is short. If this appears in the latest version of
this HOWTO, please let me know if any of the non-EIA-232 listed below
are supported by Linux.

18.2. EIA-422-A (balanced) and EIA-423-A (unbalanced)

EIA-423 is just like the unbalanced EIA-232 except that the voltage is
only 5 volts. Since this falls within EIA-232 specs it can be
connected to a EIA-232 port. Its specs call for somewhat higher
speeds than the EIA-232 (but this may be of little help on a long run
where it's the unbalance that causes interference).

Apple's Mac computer prior to mid-1998 with its EIA-232/EIA-422 Port
provided twisted-pairs (balanced) for transmit and receive (when used
as a 422). It is (per specs) exactly 100 times as fast as EIA-423
(which in turn is somewhat faster than EIA-232) The Mac used a small
round "mini-DIN-8" connector. It also provided conventional EIA-232
but at only at 5 volts (which is still legal EIA-232). To make it
work like at EIA-232 one must use a special cable which (signal)
grounds RxD+ (one side of a balanced pair) and use RxD- as the receive
pin. While TxD- is used as the transmit pin, for some reason TxD+
should not be grounded. See Macintosh Communications FAQ
<http://www.modemshop.com/csm-comm-faq.html>. However, due to the
fact that Macs (and upgrades for them) cost more than PC's, they are
not widely as host computers for Linux.

18.3. EIA-485

This is like EIA-422 (balanced). It is half-duplex. It's not just
point-to-point but may be used for a multidrop LAN (up to 32 nodes).
There are no connector specs.

18.4. EIA-530

EIA-530-A (balanced but can also be used unbalanced) at 2Mbits/s
(balanced) was intended to be a replacement for EIA-232 but few have
been installed. It uses the same 25-pin connector as EIA-232.

18.5. EIA-612/613

The High Speed Serial Interface ( HSSI = EIA-612/613) uses a 50-pin
connector and goes up to about 50 Mbits/s but the distance is limited
to only several meters. For Linux there are PCI cards supporting
HSSI. The companies that sell the cards often provide (or point you
to) a Linux driver. A mini-howto or the like is needed for this
topic.

18.6. The Universal Serial Bus (USB)

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is being built into PCI chips. New
PC's have them. It is 12 Mbits/s over a twisted pair with a 4-pin
connector (2 wires are power supply) but it also is limited to short
distances of at most 5 meters (depends on configuration).

Another HOWTO is needed for it. Work is underway for supporting it in
Linux (but no HOWTO). It is synchronous and transmits in special
packets like a network. Just like a network, it can have several
devices attached to it. Each device on it gets a time-slice of
exclusive use for a short time. A device can also be guaranteed the
use of the bus at fixed intervals. One device can monopolize it if no
other device wants to use it. It's not simple to describe in detail.

18.7. Synchronization & Synchronous

Beside the asynchronous EIA-232 (and others) there are a number of
synchronous serial port standards. In fact EIA-232 includes
synchronous specifications but they aren't normally implemented for
serial ports on PC's. But first we'll explain what a synchronous
means.

18.7.1. Defining Asynchronous vs Synchronous

Asynchronous (async) means "not synchronous". In practice, an async
signal is what the async serial port sends and receives which is a
stream of bytes each delimited by a start and stop bit. Synchronous
(sync) is most everything else. But this doesn't explain the basic
concepts.

In theory, synchronous means that bytes are sent out at a constant
rate one after another in step with a clock signal tick. There is
often a separate wire or channel for sending the clock signal.
Asynchronous bytes may be sent out erratically with various time
intervals between bytes (like someone typing characters at a
keyboard).

There are certain situations that need to be classified as either sync
or async. The async serial port often sends out bytes in a steady
stream which would make this a synchronous case but since they still
have the start/stop bits (which makes it possible to send them out
erratically) it's called async. Another case is where data bytes
(without any start-stop bits) are put into packets with possible
erratic spacing between one packet and the next. This is called sync
since the bytes within each packet must be transmitted synchronously.

18.7.2. Synchronous Communication

Did you ever wonder what all the unused pins are for on a 25-pin
connector for the serial port? Most of them are for use in
synchronous communication which is seldom implemented on PC's. There
are pins for sync timing signals as well as for a sync reverse
channel. The EIA-232 spec provides for both sync and async but PC's
use a UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter) chip such as
a 16450, 16550A, or 16650 and can't deal with sync. For sync one
needs a USART chip or the equivalent where the "S" stands for
Synchronous. Since sync is a niche market, a sync serial port is
likely to be quite expensive.

Besides the sync part of the EIA-232, there are various other EIA
synchronous standards. For EIA-232, 3 pins of the connector are
reserved for clock (or timing) signals. Sometimes it's a modem's task
to generate some timing signals making it impossible to use
synchronous communications without a synchronous modem (or without a
device called a "synchronous modem eliminator" which provides the
timing signals).

Although few serial ports are sync, synchronous communication does
often take place over telephone lines using modems which use V.42
error correction. This strips off the start/stop bits and puts the
date bytes in packets resulting in synchronous operation over the
phone line.

19. Other Sources of Information

19.1. Books

1. Axleson, Jan: Serial Port Complete, Lakeview Research, Madison, WI,
1998.

2. Black, Uyless D.: Physical Layer Interfaces & Protocols, IEEE
Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1996.

3. Campbell, Joe: The RS-232 Solution, 2nd ed., Sybex, 1982.

4. Levine, Donald: POSIX Programmer's Guide
<http://www.ora.com/catalog/posix/>, (ISBN 0-937175-73-0; O'Reilly)

5. Putnam, Byron W.: RS-232 Simplified, Prentice Hall, 1987.

6. Seyer, Martin D.: RS-232 Made Easy, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 1991.

7. Stevens, Richard W.: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
<http://heg-
school.aw.com/cseng/authors/stevens/advanced/advanced.nclk>, (ISBN
0-201-56317-7; Addison-Wesley)

8. Tischert, Michael & Bruno Jennrich: PC Intern, Abacus 1996.
Chapter 7: Serial Ports

Notes re books:

1. "... Complete" has hardware details (including register) but the
programming aspect is Window oriented.

2. "Physical Layer ..." covers much more than just EIA-232.

19.2. Serial Software

It's best to use the nearest mirror site, but here's the main sites:
Serial Software <ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/serial/> for
Linux software for the serial ports including getty and port monitors.
Serial Communications
<ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/serialcomm> for communication
programs.

� irqtune will give serial port interrupts higher priority to improve
performance. Using hdparm for hard-disk tuning may help some more.

� modemstat and statserial show the current state of various modem
control lines. See ``Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics''

19.3. Linux Documents

� man pages for: setserial(8) stty

� libc (or glibc) docs package: "Low Level Terminal Interface"

� Modem-HOWTO: modems on the serial port

� PPP-HOWTO: help with PPP (using a modem on the serial port)

� Printing-HOWTO: for setting up a serial printer

� Serial-Programming-HOWTO: for some aspects of serial-port
programming

� Text-Terminal-HOWTO: how they work and how to install and configure

� UPS-HOWTO: setting up UPS sensors connected to your serial port

� UUCP-HOWTO: for information on setting up UUCP

19.4. Usenet newsgroups:

� comp.os.linux.answers

� comp.os.linux.hardware: Hardware compatibility with the Linux
operating system.

� comp.os.linux.networking: Networking and communications under
Linux.

� comp.os.linux.setup: Linux installation and system administration.

19.5. Serial Mailing List

The Linux serial mailing list. To join, send email to
majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu, with ``subscribe linux-serial'' in the
message body. If you send ``help'' in the message body, you get a
help message. The server also serves many other Linux lists. Send
the ``lists'' command for a list of mailing lists.

19.6. Internet

� Serial Suite <ftp://scicom.alphacdc.com/pub/linux> by Vern Hoxie
is a collection of blurbs about the care and feeding of the Linux
serial port plus some simple programs. When logging into 'scicom'
as "anonymous", you must use your full e-mail address as the
password. For example: greg.hankins@cc.gatech.edu

� A white paper discussing serial communications and multiport serial
boards was available from Cyclades at http://www.cyclades.com.

END OF Serial-HOWTO