Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 21 Oct 1997 13:01:42 -0700
From:      Marcio Saito <marcio@cyclades.com>
To:        dg@root.com, support@freebsd.com
Cc:        cy_serial@cyclades.com, John Lima <johnl@cyclades.com>
Subject:   Changes in the Cyclades Cyclom-Y.
Message-ID:  <344D0A26.75720A8B@cyclades.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
David Greenman:

I'm writing to let you know about some changes coming for the
Cyclom-Y boards (that will require a few small changes on the
Cyclom-Y driver) and to see how we can work this out so that our
common users can still count on full support from FreeBSD for the
Cyclades products.

As a matter of fact, these changes will affect any board based on
the Cirrus Logic CD1400 serial processor (I believe you support
other CD1400-based cards).

Cirrus Logic is closing the factory that manufactures the CD1400
rev G (the one being used today). Starting this month, they will
provide only the CD1400 rev I. Cyclades has enough parts to sell
until mid-98, but we will have to change to the new chip.

We are in process of re-layouting the boards and, starting in
December for some models, we will be shipping a new hardware
version of the Cyclom-Y boards. The transition will be complete
by March of 98.

The CD1400 is 100% software compatible but, unfortunatelly, it is
not pin-compatible. So, we need to redesign the board.

There are two HW changes that affect Software:

1) The new CD1400 run at 60 MHz (against 25MHz used today). That
makes it faster and allow baud rates up to 230kbps. In SW, we
need to change the baud rate divisor tables (registers RCOR,
RBPR, TCOR and TBPR) and the PPR register initialization to
account for the change in the clock.

2) You are probably familiar with the fact that the CD1400 can do
automatic reception HW flow control (drop a modem control signal
signal when the reception FIFO is getting full and the driver
doesn't empty it fast enough). Unfortunatelly, the CD1400 do that
using the pin labeled as DTR, which makes it not very useful with
V.34 modems. Since we are re-layouting the board, we are also
inverting DTR and RTS in HW (connecting the CD1400 pin labeled
DTR to the RTS connector pin and vice versa), so that we can take
advantage of this CD1400 feature. Because of that, the driver has
to be changed to reverse the meaning of RTS and DTR (basically,
swap the accesses to the MSVR1 and MSVR2 registers) for the new
boards. Since the SW can identify the new boards and swap the
DTR/RTS handling by itself, the HW change is transparent to users
(no special cables needed).

Because we want the driver to support both and even mix old and
new cards, we need a per-port flag in the driver that says
whether the port is in a new or old card. This flag defines the
baud-rate divider values to be loaded  and the correct treatment
of DTR and RTS.

The flag is set for each port at initialization time based on the
CD1400 version ID (GFRCR register). Any revision number prior to
and including 0x46 (rev G) should use the old baud rate table and
original DTR/RTS handling. Any version above 0x46 (the rev I is
0x48) should use the new scheme, support 230kbps, revert DTR and
RTS and, optionally, take advantage of the on-chip HW flow
control to avoid FIFO overflows.

As I said above, the new boards will start to come out already in
mid-December (Cyclom-8Yo). In February/98, the Cyclom-8Ys and the
Cyclom-Ye (16-port modules) will be changed. By April, we should
complete the transition with the 8-port external modules.

As you can see from the explanation above, the changes are very
localized and simple. Until now, FreeBSD has been developing and
maintaining the driver. We can provide CD1400 documentation (even
though, besides what I listed above, there are no changes that
affect SW), code fragments, support and actual HW prototype units
for test and validation.

It is Cyclades interest to have the drivers updated as soon as
possible (if possible, before December comes). I would like to
get some feedback from you in terms of how you prefer to conduct
the changes. If necessary and appropriated, we could even get the
latest driver version from you, execute and validate the changes
and give it back to you within a few days. In that case I would
ask you to send us the latest revision of the driver files and
give us an idea of the FreeBSD release schedule so that we can
get it done early enough.

Please give us some feedback and acknolowdge the receipt of this
message.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Regards,

Marcio.
_____________________________________________________________________

Marcio Saito
Product Manager/Dir. of Technology
mailto:marcio@cyclades.com - voice: 510-770-9727 x214
Cyclades Corporation - http://www.cyclades.com
_____________________________________________________________________






Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?344D0A26.75720A8B>