I purchased a 16c2850 based rs232 four port card and cannot make it work. the vendor says it works in the 2.6.11 kernel but I cannot even compile a kernel that old in my environment: asm errors... The key problem seems to center around the CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_MULTIPORT option that existed in the old kernels but no longer exists in 2.6.17 and up. Now there seems to be a plethora of hardware specific driver modules that replace the MULTIPORT option.
When I try to do a
setserial /dev/ttyS4 port 0x120 irq 12 autoconfig I get the invalid parameter error from setserial. This is after adding nr_uarts=16 to the kernel startup. If I insmod one of the hardware specific drivers then the ttyS4 through ttyS15 become available but none seems to control my hardware correctly.
Any clues? It is a Diamond systems Emerald-MM-Opto four port RS232 and DIO card.