Will USB serial ever be fixed?

From: Paul Marciano (pm940_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/09/05

  • Next message: Pablo Ruggia: "Beta-3 Install" 
    Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 10:09:43 -0700 (PDT)
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-usb@freebsd.org

    I have a general question on the status of USB to
    serial support in FreeBSD (specifically the ucom and
    ftdi drivers).

    I need an extra serial port on my system and for
    reasons outside the scope of this email I can't just
    plug in a PCI card. I'm trying to use USB, but it
    seems that ucom is broken and no one is fixing it.

    A tcflush() bug posted last year reports that USB
    serial ports hang on a call to tcflush(). This can be
    observed by using getty on one.

    Another poster reported problems running PPP
    (including a kernel crash).

    Given the lack of movement in these bugs, it looks
    like the FreeBSD developers don't care about ucom...
    certainly not enough to fix it.

    Now I could get up on a soapbox and say how
    unacceptable it is for a fundamental peripheral like
    serial ports (even though they're over USB) to be so
    obviously broken for so long... but I won't, because
    I'm not a developer and I understand that it's a
    volunteer thing and overall FreeBSD is otherwise
    excellent.

    So without wanting to offend (whilst secretly being
    pretty frustrated with the corner I find myself in) I
    would like to know, hopefully from someone responsible
    for the subsystem, if ucom/ftdi is likely to be fixed
    in the next six months.

    Sigh. I really don't want to have to move to Linux
    for something this small, but USB serial is a system
    component I can't change.

    Be honest. Be brutal. I need to know where FreeBSD
    stands on this.

    Thanks,
    Paul.

            
                    
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