seri2c driver homepage

Overview

Some time ago the company Tritec Electronic AG has produced a PCI card which offers eight serial ports. The card was shipped with drivers for the Solaris Operating System running on SPARC platforms.

Tritec provided drivers for Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 (32 and 64 bit) but these drivers also work on newer versions of Solaris. They are limited to the sun4u architecture (UltraSparc from Sun Microsystems).
In 2009 the company put the source code of the driver under the BSD license. This project here was setup to make the source available and allow further development of the driver.

Hardware

The PCI card was build with several standard components:

PCI 9050-1: The PCI 9050-1 chip from PLX Technology offers the PCI bus target (server) interface
CL-CD1865: The CL-CD1865 chip from Cirrus offers the eight serial interfaces
PCF 8584: The PCF 8584 chip from NXP (previously known as Philips Semiconductors) offers I2C bus which is connected on the hardware but currently not supported by the driver.
FM93CS46: The FM93CS46 chip offers a Microwire Bus Interface with an 1024-Bit Serial EEPROM. This component is from Fairchild Semiconductor.

The PCI card features eight RJ12 ports and the used chips can drive all eight ports at 115200 Baud simultaneously.

Overview of the card:

The back of the card features the eight RJ12 ports:

The PIN assignment for this card:

RJ-12 Signal Sub-D Description

9-pin 25-pin

1 DCD 1 8 Data Carrier Detect

2 RxD 2 3 Receive Data

3 RTS 7 4 Request To Send

4 GND 5 7 Signal Ground

5 TxD 3 2 Transmit Data

6 CTS 8 5 Clear To Send

Note: The information for the Sub-D ports are just for reference and used if you want to connect the serial port to the serial console port of a Sun system.

Software

The seri2c driver is written in the C language. Original development was done by Tritec in the year 2000. In 2009 the company put this code under the BSD license and agreed to publication as OpenSource on SourceForge. The received files for this transitioning are available in the 0.1 release of this project and still contain the original copyright statements from Tritec (rather then the new BSD license). It also contains some german comments on how to build the software but the information is not complete.
Further development of this driver will include the appropriate BSD license information while the full credit to Tritec remains. The build infrastructure also needs to be completed and documented.

The driver will attach itself to PCI ID pci1013,7431 and provides the serial interfaces in /dev/term/ where you can find one number for each port. Use the prtdiag command to verify that the hardware itself is recognized by the system (check for pci1013,7431 in the output). Use the prtconf -D command to verify that the driver seri2c has found the hardware and attached itself (which may require a reconfigure boot or the devfsadm command).

This project is hosted at SourceForge and all additional information is available at the seri2c project homepage. This includes the downloads, discussion forums, bug reports and everything else.

Known limitations

Right now there are a few limitations with the initial files published by this project:

The driver will only provide access to the eight serial ports but not to the two I2C ports
The driver is written for Sparc systems and will not work with other architectures (e.g. x86)
The Makefile references the DDI Driver Compliance Kit which is no longer available from Sun
You'll need the Solaris kernel headers if you want to build the driver by your own
The information how to build the packages is not yet included
The binary package is not yet zone aware. If you have a system with non-global zones then used the pkgadd -G command in the global zone

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Tritec Electronic AG for allowing the distribution and further development under the BSD license.

We need some help to develop the driver and to maintain this project. Please contact one of the project administrators listed on the sourceforge project page. Thanks.