Who should use this utility: Users with cards having serial ports that use a version of UART chip manufactured by Twist, and who are experiencing lockup during accesses on the serial port.

Operating systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista.
Function: This utility will first test your system for devices that have the component in question. If necessary, the utility will then replace the driver currently in use with a new one for the device(s) involved. If your system does not need a driver replacement, nothing will be changed. A message will appear indicating the completion of the replacement.

Use: Download the utility and extract it. Run the “checkuart” executable file. The process is automatic.

NOTE 1: You will need to reboot your system for the new driver to take effect.

NOTE 2: Users with Windows 2000 will need to wait while the operating system configures devices, owing to the nature of this particular operating system. Please be patient and wait for the system to finish and the replacement utility to supply the completion message.

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LAVA does not provide drivers or support for UNIX. SCO UNIX has a command called mkdev serial that can install the port in UNIX. Consult the documentation for your version of UNIX to see if this is the correct command for you and the appropriate switches.

This note is useful in understanding configuration when software might require a specific Com port below Com 5.

Windows 95/98/Me/2000 cannot enumerate PCI serial ports starting at COM2 or COM3.

The way the Windows serial port enumerator (serenum.vxd) works is:

It first checks the I/O address of the serial port.

If the I/O address is 3f8 then it assigns that serial port COM1.

If the I/O address is 2f8 then it assigns that serial port COM2.

If the I/O address is 3e8 then it assigns that serial port COM3.

If the I/O address is 2e8 then it assigns that serial port COM4.

If the port has an I/O address other than what is shown above, then Windows enumerates the ports

starting at COM5.

PCI cards are completely configured by the system. The system cannot configure PCI cards with the I/O addresses shown above. Those are reserved for ISA devices so Windows will always enumerate our PCI ports starting at COM5.

If you wish to reassign serial ports, use the LAVA redirect software.

LAVA PCI cards do not install in Win2000 using a setup utility. They install when New Hardware is found at boot up of Windows. Windows searches your hard and floppy drives for an .inf file that includes the setup information for our card. This is a plain text file that contains the setup information for our card. Sometimes, it does not find this file so it is necessary to have our card reinstall.

The following procedure will reinstall our card:

1) Right Click on My Computer from the desktop and enter Properties and then Device Manager. Enter the section called Other Devices or Unknown Devices.

2) Remove the reference to either PCI card or PCI Serial Controller or PCI parallel controller by right-clicking on it and entering Uninstall.

3) Shut down your computer normally and ensure that our card is seated properly in the PCI slot.

4) Upon entering Windows, when New Hardware is found direct it to the LAVA Win2000 .inf file.

5) Let Windows search for our installation file and reinstall our card correctly.

WINDOWS 2000 FEATURES

In Windows 95/98/Me we provide a utility for redirecting the COM port assignment that Windows assigns our ports. This utility is not necessary in later versions of Windows. The following is the procedure to redirect our port in Windows 2000.

1) Go to Device Manager by right-clicking on My Computer from the Desktop and entering Properties.

2) Open up Ports (COM & LPT) by clicking the + sign to the left.

3) Double-click the port you wish to redirect and enter the Port Settings Tab.

4) Click the Advanced Button.

5) In the Window that appears you can redirect the port assignment.

SPECIAL WINDOWS 2000 FEATURE

Parallel Port LPT assignments can be redirected. Currently the choice for redirection is LPT1 LPT2 or LPT3.

CLEANING UP YOUR INF FILE

If you are updating the .inf file from a previous version of this file it is necessary to remove the old version. You must go to the Windows\inf folder. If you don’t see the inf folder then your folder options are set to hide that folder. To see that folder go to View|Folder Options|View

In there make sure that the show all files option is set. Our .inf file is found under the name oemX.inf, where X is some integer. You must edit using notepad.exe each oemX.inf file and look for a reference to LAVA. If there is a reference to LAVA then remove that file. Also, remove the associated oemX.pnf that is located here as well.

Note: LAVA PCI cards do not use a setup utility to install in Windows 95/98/Me/2000. They install when New Hardware is found at boot up of Windows. Windows searches your hard and floppy drives for an .inf file that includes the setup information for our card. Sometimes, it does not find this file so it is necessary to reinstall the card.

The following procedure will reinstall the card:

1) Right-click on My Computer from the desktop and enter Properties and then Device Manager. Enter the section called Other Devices or Unknown Devices.

2) Remove the reference to either PCI card or PCI Serial Controller.

3) Shut down your computer normally and ensure that the card is seated properly in the PCI slot.

4) Upon re-entering Windows and when New Hardware is found, place the LAVA Installation and Utilities disk into the drive.

5) Let Windows search for our installation file to reinstall our card correctly.

Also:

In Windows 95 B OSR2 a patch must be run in order for PCI devices to function properly. In Device Manager check if there is an Other Devices Section. In there you might see a PCI bridge device and a Universal Serial Bus controller both with question marks (?). If this is the case then you must run the Windows patch that comes on a floppy or CD ROM with the motherboard while our card is NOT in the system. The file is usually called piix4.exe or something similar. Consult the readme files on the disk to find out what the file is exactly named in your case.

Also:

If your card is a generic version of a LAVA card, it will require drivers written specifically for that card. Consult Technical Support to obtain generic drivers.

If reinstalling the card doesn’t work, check the following:

A) Ensure that the card is seated in the slot properly.

B) See that the slot that the card is in has no problem. Try the card in a different slot ensuring that it is properly seated in the slot.

C) Some computers give errors with our card if the card is placed in a dedicated PCI slot if there are shared PCI / ISA slots in that computer. Try the card in one of the shared PCI ISA slots.

D) Ensure that the card itself has no problems. If it does, replace it through the reseller of your card. If they are not willing to replace it then we can.

Installation

1. With the power turned off, insert the Quattro-PCI card into any free PCI slot in your PC. Make sure the card is well seated. Turn your PC on and start QNX 6.

NOTE: If you are using an AGP video card you may find that QNX will not boot with the card in the PCI slot immediately following the AGP slot. Simply place the card in the second slot to alleviate this problem.

2. Since the Quattro-PCI card has multiple ports sharing a single Device ID, QNX will only be able auto-detect the presence of the first port of each Device ID (Port A and Port C).

3. Obtain the Lava Serial Driver and follow the directions in the Readme.1st file. You will need to modify the Port Addresses in the Lava.include file to match the actual IO addresses in the PCI listings on your own system.

4. Reboot your system. If you have correctly configured your system you should find that QNX will set up all four serial ports at start-up.

NOTE: The Lava.include driver may need to be reconfigured if the profile of your system is modified (i.e. by adding or removing any PCI cards). If you find that you are having problems with all of the ports on your Lava card you may want to double check that the IO addresses in the PCI listing match the values set in the Lava.include file.

5. To verify that the card has been installed you may check in either the /etc/dev/ folder, or in QNX’s System Information (Launch>Utilities>System Information). Within the System Information listing you will find a process named “devc-ser8250”. By selecting this process you will have access to several different information tabs. Selecting the Arguments tab (Args) will provide you with the exact arguments that were passed to the devcser8250 process at boot-up. From here you can easily determine which port is assigned to which serial device by referring to the card’s resources.

For example, given the process command “devc-ser8250 -u1 3F8,3 -u2 2F8,4 -u3 a000,5″ we can see that Com1 and Com2 were mapped to devices Ser1 and Ser2 respectively and our serial port at a000 was mapped to device Ser3.

Card Resources

You can easily determine the physical address and IRQ resources of the card’s serial port by displaying the PCI listing “pci -v”. This command will display all the information for each of the PCI devices on the system bus. To find the IO address and IRQ of the card, simply scan through the output of this command for a section beginning with “Vendor ID = 1407h, LAVA Computer MFG Inc.”, of which there should be two sections, one for each port.

NOTE: QNX will always enumerate ports in sequential order. Therefore, when reading the PCI listing from top to bottom the address of Port A will be displayed first, followed immediately by the address of Port B. The ordering same can be applied to Device IDs.

Testing

Testing the card’s functionality can be done by using QNX’s own terminal program, Qtalk, and a loopback connector. To test a port, attach the loopback connector and open up a Qtalk session by executing the command “qtalk -m /dev/ser3 -b 115200,8,n,1″ on the port. While the loopback connector is attached any characters entered in Qtalk should be echoed back to the screen. Removing the loopback connector should prevent character echoing from occurring.

Troubleshooting

If for some reason the card was not picked up by QNX at boot-up, but the card is displayed in the PCI listing, you may manually add the port by using the devc-ser8250 command.

Example: Say we have four serial ports residing at physical addresses=a000, a400, a800 and ac00, all sharing IRQ=5 and none of which is allocated a serial device in the /etc/dev/ folder. If we have determined that Ser1 and Ser2 already exist in the /etc/dev/ folder (this is done by inspecting the folder /etc/dev/ for all serial devices), we can add four new serial devices by running the command: devc-ser8250 -u3 a000,5 -u4 a400,5 -u5 a800,5 -u6 ac00,5

This is a very simple example of adding four new serial devices by using the devc-ser8250 command. Full documentation of all the options associated with this command can be found in the QNX 6 RTOS Utilities Reference Manual.

Installation

On install during the bootup process, the Linux hardware discovery utility detects the Quattro-PCI and installs it as ttyS4 ,ttyS5, ttyS6, and ttyS7. These settings will change depending on how many serial ports you have and how they are configured.

However, on installation the card will be configured incorrectly. To configure the card correctly, first find out the port information (I/O range and IRQ) for each serial port. To retrieve that information type at the command line:

lspci -v

You will then see two separate entries for a “Serial Controller: Lava Computer MFG”. Below each will be a IRQ number and two I/O ports. Write down that information for all ports (for example, IRQ 12, d400, d800, IRQ 12, dc00, e000).

Then edit the file:

/etc/rc.d/rc.local

Add the following lines at the end of the file:

setserial /dev/ttyS4 port 0xd400 irq 12 uart 16550a baud_base 115200 ^fourport

setserial /dev/ttyS5 port 0xd800 irq 12 uart 16550a baud_base 115200 ^fourport

setserial /dev/ttyS6 port 0xdc00 irq 12 uart 16550a baud_base 115200 ^fourport

setserial /dev/ttyS7 port 0xe000 irq 12 uart 16550a baud_base 115200 ^fourport

The example above uses the information gained from the lspci -v command. The details of your information may be different. Be sure to save the added changes. On reboot all of the ports should be operational.

RS232 DB9 Connector

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RS-232 Serial PC Port Connector DB-25

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RS232 RJ45 Connector

NOTE: The following instructions apply to PCI-bus serial 16550 UART ports and to PCI-bus parallel ports.

LAVA PCI cards take drivers native to Windows XP as well as LAVA drivers. When installing PCI cards, Windows XP asks for a driver disk. After searching the LAVA Installation Disk, Windows will also use drivers taken from the Windows XP Operating System.

When installing, a generic message may appear indicating a driver has not been submitted to Microsoft for approval. Continue with the install.

To change parallel port settings:

If you wish to change the LPT designation given to a port, go to the Device Manager, select the “Ports” menu, and select the port you want to change. Go to the “Properties” for that port, and select “Port settings.” Use the drop-down menu to change the LPT number as needed.

To change serial port settings:

If you wish to change the COM designation given to a port, go to the Device Manager, select the “Ports” menu, and select the port you want to change. Go to the “Properties” for that port, and select “Port settings.” Select “Advanced” and then use the drop-down menu to change the COM number as needed.

1) Create a DOS boot diskette on a non-NT system (DOS, WIN9x, or Win3.11) using the following command:

format a: /s

2) Copy lavaconf.exe (our LAVA PCI card detection routine) to that installation diskette.

3) Insert the LAVA PCI 16550 PCI card into an available PCI slot.

4) Boot to the DOS boot diskette.

5) Run lavaconf.exe from that diskette.

6) Record what Lavaconf reports.

7) Restart the computer and boot to NT3.51

8) Go to Control Panel and Click Ports.

9) Click Add and then click the Properties for the port that was added.

10) Go to Settings and then Advanced.

11) Configure the IO address and IRQ to what you recorded in step 6. (NOTE: the IO address will not be a choice in the list. You must type over what is in the list.)

12) Repeat steps 9-11 for all the Lava Serial ports you are adding.

13) Reboot after all the ports have been added.

NOTE: The following instructions apply to PCI-bus serial 16550 UART ports.

LAVA PCI serial ports take drivers native to Windows XP as well as LAVA drivers. When installing PCI serial ports, Windows XP asks for a driver disk. After searching the LAVA Installation Disk, Windows will also use drivers taken from the Windows XP Operating System.

When installing, a generic message may appear indicating a driver has not been submitted to Microsoft for approval. Continue with the install.

To change serial port settings:

If you wish to change the COM designation given to a port, go to the Device Manager, select the “Ports” menu, and select the port you want to change. Go to the “Properties” for that port, and select “Port settings.” Select “Advanced” and then use the drop-down menu to change the COM number as needed.

Application: All LAVA PCI Serial Cards

Question:

I am running the final release of Windows 98 and when I run your ModemSpeed or Redirect utility with your PCI serial card it does not recognize the port. What’s going on?

Answer:

The fix for redirecting the card to lower COM port settings is the following:

1) Go to Start|Run and type regedit and then click OK.

2) Go to the following place in the registry.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\MF\CHILD0000\PCI&VEN_1407&DEV_0200&BUS_00&DEV_09&FUNC_00]

3) Modify the following string values by double-clicking the tab to the left of that String name. Change COM# to a value that is not already being used. i.e. COM3 or COM4. Verify this by checking ports in Device Manager.

“DeviceDesc”=”LavaPort 650 PCI (COM5)”

“PORTNAME”=”COM5″

“FRIENDLYNAME”=”LavaPort 650 PCI (COM5)”

Leave the following strings alone.

“HardwareID”=”PORT650PCI,MF\\CHILD0000″

“Class”=”Ports”

“Driver”=”Ports\\0001″

“Mfg”=”Lava Computer MFG. Inc.”

“ConfigFlags”=hex:00,00,00,00

4) Repeat Step 3 for the other port of the card(if it has one) found in the following place in the Registry.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\MF\CHILD0001\PCI&VEN_1407&DEV_0200&BUS_00&DEV_09&FUNC_00]