Parallel port missing in 1.2.3-release

wallabybob

I just upgraded the firmware in my pfSense 2.0 system to the 1-Jan-2011 snapshot build. On reboot I entered the BIOS and (as I expected) the parallel port was disabled. I changed the parallel port setting from Disabled to 378/IRQ7 (first option, others were 278/IRQ5 and 3BC/IRQ7). On reboot I saw in the startup output:


. . .
ppc0: <parallel port="">port 0x378-0x37f,0x778-0x77b irq 7 drq 3 on acpi0
ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode
ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/16 bytes threshold
ppc0: [ITHREAD]
ppbus0: <parallel port="" bus="">on ppc0
plip0: <plip network="" interface="">on ppbus0
plip0: [ITHREAD]
lpt0: <printer>on ppbus0
lpt0: [ITHREAD]
lpt0: Interrupt-driven port
ppi0: <parallel i="" o="">on ppbus0
 . . .

# ls -l /dev/lpt0
crw-------  1 root  wheel    0,  49 Jan  3 21:45 /dev/lpt0
#</parallel></printer></plip></parallel></parallel>

Perhaps you have a "standard" parallel port but at a non-standard address. Can you find out its address, IRQ and (possibly) DMA channel? Perhaps the BIOS will report that; perhaps the BIOS will allow changing it to use standard port address and IRQ (378/IRQ7)

You don't seem to be using ACPI. Is there a reason for that? I expect ACPI would tell FreeBSD the parallel port I/O resources. (ACPI is enabled in my system.)

If you can't use ACPI there are alternate ways of specifying the parallel port i/o resources but it might be best to get the parallel port at the standard address, reboot and see if the startup reports a ppc0.

wallabybob

On my pfSense 2.0 box FreeBSD detects the parallel port regardless of which of the three addresses it is assigned and regardless of whether ACPI is enabled or disabled. The parallel port controller is named ppc0 if the port address is 0x378 or 0x3bc and is named ppc1 if the port address is 0x278.

So what are the port addresses of these parallel ports which aren't detected? Maybe that information can be found in the BIOS. In my system the menu path is Integrated Peripherals -> Onboard SuperIO and from there I can change the parallel port settings.

wolfiedk

Hello again.

I have now tryed with the LiveCD pfsense2.0beta snapshot 03-jan-2010 and it detects the parallel port just fine. The error must bee in the 1.2.3-release kernel (or something like that, but i´m only guessing)

Is is possible to integrate the missing "driveres" into the 1.2.3-release?
I cant switch to the 2.0 because i´m using the multi-wan setup.

Best regards
WolfieDK

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