Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 10:09:43 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Marciano <pm940@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-usb@freebsd.org Subject: Will USB serial ever be fixed? Message-ID: <20050909170944.77242.qmail@web54002.mail.yahoo.com>
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I have a general question on the status of USB to serial support in FreeBSD (specifically the ucom and ftdi drivers). I need an extra serial port on my system and for reasons outside the scope of this email I can't just plug in a PCI card. I'm trying to use USB, but it seems that ucom is broken and no one is fixing it. A tcflush() bug posted last year reports that USB serial ports hang on a call to tcflush(). This can be observed by using getty on one. Another poster reported problems running PPP (including a kernel crash). Given the lack of movement in these bugs, it looks like the FreeBSD developers don't care about ucom... certainly not enough to fix it. Now I could get up on a soapbox and say how unacceptable it is for a fundamental peripheral like serial ports (even though they're over USB) to be so obviously broken for so long... but I won't, because I'm not a developer and I understand that it's a volunteer thing and overall FreeBSD is otherwise excellent. So without wanting to offend (whilst secretly being pretty frustrated with the corner I find myself in) I would like to know, hopefully from someone responsible for the subsystem, if ucom/ftdi is likely to be fixed in the next six months. Sigh. I really don't want to have to move to Linux for something this small, but USB serial is a system component I can't change. Be honest. Be brutal. I need to know where FreeBSD stands on this. Thanks, Paul. ______________________________________________________ Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/
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