8430 uart register definition

[martyk]

My company's products use NI serial boards to control several serial devices simultaneously within a Linux device driver. Up to now we have been able to program at the UART register level which gives us the performance and latency we need. But the standard 16 port board is being replaced with the 8430 unit and we are concerned that this will require a major software effort if the register definitions have changed.

Can you confirm that the register definitions match those of the previous boards? If not do you publish the new ones somewhere?

Thanks.

Marty

[Steven_T]

Hello MartyK,

I can confirm that the PCI-8430/16 has a different register set than the PCI-232/16.  Any driver that was developed for one will not work with the other.  Recently, NI Serial RS232 hardware support has been added to the Linux Kernel (version 2.6.30 and up).  If you can upgrade to a distribution that includes this kernel, the boards will automatically work in Linux.

If you must develop your own driver with these boards, please contact NI-Support and reference this post.  After escalating to R&D they may be able to get some more information for you.  You can also use the Linux Kernel source code for a register set.

By the way, does the term "RAVE" mean anything to you?

Thanks,

Steven T.

[martyk]

Hi Steven T

Thanks for your quick reply. Your suggestions of escalating and looking at the Linux source are good and we will likely pursue them both. As for upgrading Linux that is a bit more of a problem because of the large amount of testing needed to qualify it for our product.

One meaning of RAVE could be Repair And Verification Equipment.

Thanks

Marty