PUC(4)

NAME
puc - PCI “universal” communications card driver

SYNOPSIS
puc* at pci? dev ? function ?
com* at puc? port ?
lpt* at puc? port ?

DESCRIPTION
The puc driver provides support for PCI communications cards containing simple communications ports, such as NS16550-family (com) serial ports and standard PC-like (lpt) parallel ports. The driver is called “universal” because the interfaces to these devices aren't nearly as well defined and standard as they should be.

The driver currently supports the following cards:

Dolphin 4014 (dual parallel)
Dolphin 4035 (dual serial)
SIIG CyberSerial PCI (single serial)
VScom PCI-800 (8 port serial, probably OEM)

The driver does not support the cards:

Dolphin 4006 (single parallel)
Dolphin 4025 (single serial)
Dolphin 4078 (dual serial and single parallel)
SIIG CyberParallel PCI (single parallel)
SIIG CyberParallel Dual PCI (dual parallel)
SIIG Cyber 2S1P PCI (dual serial and single parallel)

but support for them (and for similar cards) should be trivial to add.

The port locator is used to identify the port (starting from 0) on the communications card that a subdevice is supposed to attach to. Typically, the numbering of ports is explained in a card's hardware documentation, and the port numbers used by the driver are the same as (or one off from, e.g. the manual uses ports numbered starting from 1) those described in the documentation.

SEE ALSO
com(4), lpt(4), pci(4)

HISTORY
The puc driver appeared in NetBSD 1.4.

AUTHOR
The puc driver was written by Chris Demetriou.

BUGS
The current design of this driver keeps any com ports on these cards from easily being used as console. Of course, because boards with those are PCI boards, they also suffer from dynamic address assignment, which also means that they can't easily be used as console.

Some of cards supported by this driver have jumper-selectable com port clock multipliers, which are unsupported by this driver. Those can be easily accommodated with driver flags, or by using a properly scaled baud rate when talking to the card.

Some of the cards supported by this driver, e.g. the VScom PCI-800, have software-selectable com port clock multipliers, which are unsupported by this driver. Those can be accomodated using internal driver flags, or by using a properly scaled baud rate when talking to the card.

Some ports use an lpt driver other than the machine-independent driver. Those ports will not be able to use lpt ports attached to puc devices.