OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware
OS/2 on Virtualbox with 8 COM ports
Daniele:
--- Quote from: Andreas Schnellbacher on March 01, 2021, 06:35:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: Neil Waldhauer on March 01, 2021, 04:00:07 pm ---As I said earlier, the StarTech PCI 8-port card works great with OS/2.
--- End quote ---
Neil, trying to avoid misunderstanding by reading your previous posts again: StarTech PCI 8-port works, but StarTech PCI Express 8-port doesn't.
--- End quote ---
It’s seems Startech doesn’t produce PCI board anymore....
Only PCIe are available.
But the problem is that OS/2 has no drivers for PCIe slot?
Neil Waldhauer:
As I discussed with Lars Erdmann earlier in this thread, the PCIe card would need a new driver. The source code is closed source, but widely available in the IBM OS/2 DDK. The old driver communicated with the serial chip in the way that drivers did in the 1980s. The new driver would have to use a method that is a little more recent. I don't believe it is a big change.
If you do get someone to write a device driver, I think that the StarTech PCIe card would be a good choice.
If you had the source code for the CC application, it could be modified and recompiled to use a different communication method to the PEP hardware.
Lars:
In fact, I had already looked into the COM.SYS source code.
What would need to be done is to remove all testing, probing and check against the default builtin COM ports (the well known 0x3F8 etc. I/O port addresses) and the corresponding checks of the BIOS data area at 40:0 (which for our case is competely deprecated) and then to replace all "in" and "out" (I/O address) instructions by "mov" (memory address instructions).
1) Unfortunately, large parts of the COM.SYS driver are written in Intel Assembler (I seem to remember but maybe I am confusing this with other drivers). I can read and program Intel Assembler but for me, it is more difficult to read and understand than C source code
2) I have no HW to test
3) I am running OS/2 as a guest under VirtualBox
Maybe one of these days ...
Martin Iturbide:
--- Quote from: Daniele on March 03, 2021, 03:11:46 pm ---But the problem is that OS/2 has no drivers for PCIe slot?
--- End quote ---
Hi
I would like that someone with more experience on this subject can answer that. My guess is that PCIe ports works on OS/2, but there most be some change/update of chipset on the StarTech 8-port PCI-e that does not work on OS/2-ArcaOS. But I would prefer if someone can confirm or deny that, since I lack of experience here.
Regards
Sean Casey:
I have had no issues using StarTech's PCIe to PCI low profile converter adapter (PEX1PCI1) with older PCI SCSI adapters. It likely would also work well with StarTech's older PCI 8-port serial adapters.
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