Hi Alexander!

In message <Pine.OSF.3.91.961218234230.7432A-100000@sable.ox.ac.uk>
          Alexander Hayward <alexander.hayward@lady-margaret-hall.oxford.ac.uk>
wrote:

> I've been having a few problems with the serial port and recent kernels.
> 
> Sometimes RiscBSD just hangs when dip starts, but not always. I think it 
> may be related to whether I turn the modem on before I boot RiscBSD or 
> not... I'm not sure. Atl-Delete then ctrl-D succeeds in partly rebooting 
> the machine - its sorta clicks and the floppy drive whirrs a bit but it 
> seems to get stuck there. It needs a proper reset before it will restart. 
> I can't remember if this happens all the time either...

I didn't have that yet. At least not with older kernels which don't have the
rather experimental new code for the combi-I/O-chip yet.
And I always turn my modem on shortly before I start dip, ie. long after
booting RiscBSD.

> The most recent kerne(4871?) seems to give the error 'Com port 
> initialization failed' or something along those lines, before similarly 
> hanging.

Hmm, isn't that for port 1 which is not used in the RiscPC? It still probably
shouldn't give an error for that though, the chip has this port, it shouldn't
matter if there's a connection to the outside or not.
I'm not sure about this though as I can't use precompiled kernels when my
phasechange-drive is on (otherwise it is considered to be sd0 as my internal
harddisk has SCSI ID 6) so I hardly use them.

Markus