On Jan 20,  2:44am, Mark Brinicombe wrote:
> Subject: Re: sligthly confused
> On Sat, 18 Jan 1997, Peter Berg wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Today I discovered a message during the boot phase that I can't explain:
> >
> > com0 at pioc0 base 0xf6210fe0-0xf6210fe7 irq 10: ns16550a, working fifo
> > com1 at pioc0 base 0xf6210be0-0xf6210be7: ns16550a, working fifo
> > ^^^^
> >
> > What device is com1 in the RiscPC ???
> > As far as I know the RPC only has one serial port. If you don't agree, look
> > at the backside of your RPC and count them ;)
>
> This is because the latest kernels were built with a second com device
> configured.
> The second serial port does exist in the Combo chip in the RiscPC. The
> device has IDE, floppy, parallel and 2 serial but only one of these is
> available at the back of the machine.
> The message is indicating that the kernel has found a second working
> serial port in the hardware. However due to not external connector you
> cannot use it. Also you will note that is does not have an interrupt  as
> Acorn did not wire the second serial port IRQ line to the IOMD ;-(
>
> So basically you can ignore the line as com1 cannot acutally be used.

Not only that but it causes some interesting crashes if you try to run pppd on
it :-)

Cheers

Rob