There appears to be a device naming inconsistancy with the BIOS-handled serial ports. I'm not enough of a C coder to narrow it down, but in terms of observed behaviour, it appears that there is a hard-coded mapping between the four BIOS serial ports and four device nodes (ttyS0[0-3]), which does not appear to be followed by devfs. My hardware: TMC dual socket 7 board, PIIX3 controller. The two onboard ports are set to BIOS [com1:] and [com3:]. I also have a two-port ISA serial card set to non-BIOS IO ports. The onboard port hardware does allow interrupt sharing. The onboard ports are assigned to /dev/tts/0 and /dev/tts/1, and I have the other two mapped with setserial to /dev/tts/2 and /dev/tts/3. Now I put a serial console on the second port. I put a getty on /dev/tts/1 in inittab, but at this point I discover that I have to pass console=ttyS2,<speed> to the kernel. Seems to work okay, until setserial opens the serial device nodes, and the serial console is overwritten with a single repeating character. This happens until the getty is spawned, and the serial console appears to go back to normal: I start to see console messages on it again. My question is, what is the best way to resolve this inconsistancy? I really can't change the serial port configuration, since I don't have any free interrupts left to unshare the serial port (well, there IS irq 6, but I can't put anything on that). I also can't use serial port 0 because of cable limitations. Could the serial code be changed to sequentially enumerate the BIOS ports, instead of hard-mapping them? Or, (I think this might be a better solution) specify the serial console port directly by IO address and IRQ, then switch it to the correct device node once serial ports are initialised? -- Ferret (who just has to do the weirdest things to his hardware) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/