mars

mars is a machine comparable to terra

mars also has a Lava Octopus-550 8-port RS232 PCI card.

it shows up under lspci -v as:

0000:01:03.0 Serial controller: Lava Computer mfg Inc Lava Octo A (prog-if 02 [16550])
	Subsystem: Lava Computer mfg Inc Lava Octo A
	Flags: slow devsel, IRQ 169
	I/O ports at 8000 [size=8]
	I/O ports at 8400 [size=8]
	I/O ports at 8800 [size=8]
	I/O ports at 8c00 [size=8]

0000:01:03.1 Serial controller: Lava Computer mfg Inc Lava Octo B (prog-if 02 [16550])
	Subsystem: Lava Computer mfg Inc Lava Octo B
	Flags: slow devsel, IRQ 169
	I/O ports at 9000 [size=8]
	I/O ports at 9400 [size=8]
	I/O ports at 9800 [size=8]
	I/O ports at 9c00 [size=8]

there are ​linux configuration instructions online

as it turned out, to properly configure the device, i needed to install the setserial package, tell debconf to configure it manually, and then create an /var/lib/setserial/autoserial.conf that looks like this:

/dev/ttyS0 uart 16550A port 0x03f8 irq 4 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS1 uart 16550A port 0x02f8 irq 3 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
## to deconfigure these guys initially so that they can be reset: 
## (don't know why they seem to be set in the first place)
/dev/ttyS2 uart none port 0x8000 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS3 uart none port 0x8400 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS4 uart none port 0x8000 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS5 uart none port 0x8400 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS6 uart none port 0x8000 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS7 uart none port 0x8400 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS8 uart none port 0x8000 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS9 uart none port 0x8400 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test

# now we configure them all:
/dev/ttyS2 uart 16550A port 0x8000 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS3 uart 16550A port 0x8400 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS4 uart 16550A port 0x8800 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS5 uart 16550A port 0x8c00 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS6 uart 16550A port 0x9000 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS7 uart 16550A port 0x9400 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS8 uart 16550A port 0x9800 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test
/dev/ttyS9 uart 16550A port 0x9c00 irq 169 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test

after udev got installed, this doesn't help any more. udev isn't automatically creating the proper `/dev/ttyS{4-9}'

​this page suggests rebuilding the kernel (presumably with CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_NR_UARTS greater than 4), but i'd really rather not maintain a whole different kernel just to make udev create 6 new devices at boot time.