What kinds of drives should we have to develope for a multi-Serials application from a ISA card

[zhoumc]

Our Embedded device must use up to 12 RS-232 serial ports, so we extended
serial ports from a ISA card. now ,we must write drives for the ISA card,
and let XPE Os recognizes the 12 serial ports just like real serial ports
,such as COM1,COM2 etc.
Can anyone tell us what kinds of drives should we have to develope for the
ISA card
Thanks

 

[Gary G. Little]

Is this REALLY going to be ISA? Edge triggered interrupts? Why not PCI and
level triggered interrupts?

I don't think you can salvage the current serial driver and use it for this.
Given that, I'd keep that serial driver to control standard COM1/2
functionality, since you need COM1/COM2 for WinDbg. I have had bad luck with
1394 so I generally do not recommend it. As to the new serial controller
with 12 devices, I would look at a WDM (possibly ISAPNP) bus driver with 12
children. You'll most likely have one ISR, possibly in the bus driver, that
will service all active devices with interrupt requests. That ISR needs to
scan ALL IO ports for interrupts, and queue any it may find to the proper
handler. Lots of ways of doing this.

 

[zhoumc]

ISA or PCI is the hardware engineering's selection, the fact is that we MUST
use ISA.
I have wanted to write two drivers: one is an ISA driver to control the
hardware, handle the one or two Interrupts producted for those 12 COMs and
read the control registers, status registers and data registers of chip
TL16C554A; and the other is an virtual serial driver based on the toster bus
driver. Using the bus driver, we can enumerate 12 virtual serial ports. But
we don't know how to connect the ISA driver and the serial driver, and what
about this idea?
Thanks a lot for your answer!

 

[zhoumc]

ISA or PCI is the hardware engineering's selection, the fact is that we MUST
use ISA.
I have wanted to write two drivers: one is an ISA driver to control the
hardware, handle the one or two Interrupts producted for those 12 COMs and
read the control registers, status registers and data registers of chip
TL16C554A; and the other is an virtual serial driver based on the toster bus
driver. Using the bus driver, we can enumerate 12 virtual serial ports. But
we don't know how to connect the ISA driver and the serial driver, and what
about this idea?
Thanks a lot for your answer!

 

[Leo Yuriev]

Hi !

take a look to my own 'serialxp' driver (http://leo.yuriev.ru/serialxp), it
cover all your needs.
support for ISA-devices is free-of-charge.