> > I suppose one reason to use com0 instead of com* is to make sure
> > these ports are exactly that.
> 
> Except that this stops working with pnpbios around..

Erm, which broken feature of isapnp is this?

If we are talking ISA PnP (I assume we are), it is possible
for an ISA pnp serial card to have one of the 'standard'
PC serial io port assignments as being a valid configuration.

If this is the case, and the 'normal' port on that address
has been disabled (or is not present on that system), and
the system BIOS is assigning resources to isa pnp cards that
do not have the 'required for boot' bit set [1], then the isa pnp
card will be found by the 'normal' serial port 'grope'.
I then suspect it will also be found by the netbsd isa pnp code
- I'm not sure what happens next.

(I did a lot of stuff with pcnet-isa cards a few years ago
- including a working config program for them that would
guarantee a fixed set of io parameters, needed for systems
with pnp bios and an os that wanted compiled in io parameters.)

	David

[1] You really need the bios to do this, it usually does so if
you say 'no' to the 'pnp aware OS' question.  I think you
should only say 'yes' to that question if you are running win95.

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk