4. Configuring the si driver

Contributed by Nick Sayer . 25 March 1998.

The Specialix SI/XIO and SX multiport cards use the si driver. A single machine can have up to 4 host cards. The following host cards are supported:

Although the SX and SI/XIO host cards look markedly different, their functionality are basically the same. The host cards do not use I/O locations, but instead require a 32K chunk of memory. The factory configuration for ISA cards places this at 0xd0000-0xd7fff. They also require an IRQ. PCI cards will, of course, auto-configure themselves.

You can attach up to 4 external modules to each host card. The external modules contain either 4 or 8 serial ports. They come in the following varieties:

To configure an ISA host card, add the following line to your kernel configuration file, changing the numbers as appropriate:

device si0 at isa? iomem 0xd0000 irq 11

Valid IRQ numbers are 9, 10, 11, 12 and 15 for SX ISA host cards and 11, 12 and 15 for SI/XIO ISA host cards.

To configure an EISA or PCI host card, use this line:

device si0

After adding the configuration entry, rebuild and install your new kernel.

Note:

The following step, is not necessary if you are using devfs(5) in FreeBSD 5.X.

After rebooting with the new kernel, you need to make the device nodes in /dev. The MAKEDEV script will take care of this for you. Count how many total ports you have and type:

# cd /dev
# ./MAKEDEV ttyAnn cuaAnn

(where nn is the number of ports)

If you want login prompts to appear on these ports, you will need to add lines like this to /etc/ttys:

ttyA01  "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"   vt100   on insecure

Change the terminal type as appropriate. For modems, dialup or unknown is fine.

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/

Questions that are not answered by the documentation may be sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.