OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Programming

SIO, SIO2K

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Roderick Klein:

--- Quote from: Neil Waldhauer on August 07, 2022, 03:24:05 pm ---Even the IBM drivers work with current PCI serial cards.

What would be nice is serial support to work with PCIe cards. An active developer could get it done.

USB serial support is pretty good, so we do not really lack for solutions.

--- End quote ---

Well there is text file in the OS2 or OS2BOOT you can update and see if PSCOM that ArcaOS ships with can be made to work.
David from AN has continued to update PL203 support in USBCOM.SYS driver.

For me SIO2K has become a write off. If the community could have had the code 10 years ago.
But even if we have thc code. We have plenty of samples floating around.

Then the legal issue that popups. Is Ray Gwiin his code based on DDK code yes or no ? So even if somebody has the code what could you do with it ? Also who could work on it ?

If the goal is to get PCI/PCIe  cards to support serial ports. I think the bottom line is that its easier to get PSCOM.SYS updated then to try and get SIO2K.SYS its sources. Its light years behind is my guess. Somebody would need a lot of time to update support for PCI serial ports.

That is my take on it.

Roderick Klein

Martin Iturbide:
Hi

I can only answer this one:

--- Quote from: Roderick Klein on August 21, 2022, 10:00:04 pm ---Then the legal issue that popups. Is Ray Gwiin his code based on DDK code yes or no ?

--- End quote ---
If it is based on the IBM DDK it can be turn into a freeware close source collaborative project on a non public repository just like Lars is doing with the Netlabs USB drivers. An organisation (like Netlabs) can keep the ownership of the changes and control it as a collaborative project between developers members that comply to the IBM DDK license.

I even think we should grab all IBM DDK source code on a non public repository and try to consolidate the changes and improvements to those drivers as a group of people that has and agree to the IBM DDK license. And also have a common agreement to give the changes of the source code to an organisation (like Netlabs) and avoid someone to take the sole ownership of the changed source code.

Regards

Lars:

--- Quote from: Roderick Klein on August 21, 2022, 10:00:04 pm ---If the goal is to get PCI/PCIe  cards to support serial ports. I think the bottom line is that its easier to get PSCOM.SYS updated then to try and get SIO2K.SYS its sources. Its light years behind is my guess. Somebody would need a lot of time to update support for PCI serial ports.

That is my take on it.

Roderick Klein

--- End quote ---

PSCOM.SYS is limited to devices that use I/O mapped registers and that support the "standard/compatibilty" set of registers (transmit reg, receive reg, mode reg, ine reg etc.).
Of course, PSCOM.SYS cannot support any "high performance" specifics. Finally, PSCOM.SYS is also limited by "mode.com" because that is the command line tool to configure serial ports (for those apps that do not support that natively) and that tool supports some upper baud limit that I forgot and I think PSCOM.SYS follows that limit. Of course, replacing mode.com with something more up-to-date (and to offer higher baud rates in PSCOM.SYS) is possible.

I personally have a card that has memory mapped registers and therefore cannot be used with PSCOM.SYS (for example it makes use of its memory mapping capabilities to access the whole receive buffer at once without the need to read from a FIFO and therefore offering the fastest access method possible).
My gut feeling is that the use of I/O mapped registers is slowly dying because I/O address space is pretty scarce (compared to memory address space), but it would need some analysis/check of modern serial cards what chips they use (if it offers the standard set of registers) and if their register access is I/O mapped or memory mapped. If there are plenty of cards around that use I/O address space, then yes, updating PSCOM.SYS would be the way to go.

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