In the BitWizard device driver service BitWizard developed the Specialix IO8+, SX and RIO Linux device drivers. You can get the installation instructions and the patches from this page. These drivers compromise the whole current range of Specialix cards. Not supported are for example the rev 1 SI cards, produced more than about 10 years ago.
Specialix now has a PCI version of the IO8+. Support for this driver has been written. If you have one of these cards (or an older ISA card for that matter) you should just install a recent kernel and find that support for your card is available. I'd appreciate it if you would report the results.
The patches have been submitted to the kernel maintainers so that you don't have to apply any patches, if you have a recent kernel. Applying the patches is no longer supported: the newest driver version is only available as a patch to a kernel that already has the IO8+ driver.
If you really want, you can get the old patches from ftp://ftp.bitwizard.nl/specialix, but you're on your own if you want to try that path.
Support for this driver has been written and is "in production" now. If you have an ISA SI, XIO or SX card, or an SX PCI card, you're welcome to grab the patch. I still apppreciate hearing success stories or if you encoutered problems.
The support is currently for 2.2 and 2.0.3x kernels only. You will need to upgrade to one of these kernels before you can use this driver. The driver is included with newer kernels. You will still have to grab the sx_firmware program from here.
The driver requires you to "upload" the firmware to the card using a utility called "sx_firmware". As the firmware has recently been upgraded, please grab the most recent version. (Especially important for printers connected to SX cards).
There is a problem with newer cards. The driver tries to correct a problem with older cards, that crashes newer cards that didn't need the fix in the first place. This will cause your PCI bus (and therfore your computer) to hang once you run sx_firmware. If you turn on debugging, you will see
sx: performing cntrl reg fix: 26 -> 06
in your logfile. (Older cards, that require the fix show "02 -> 06"). If this happens to you, you can do two things. Either upgrade to the 2.2.13 kernel (at least pre15), which has the correct fix, or delete the call to fix_sx_pci () near line 2551 in sx.c . (In this case you can't mix older cards and newer cards in one machine....)
Support for this driver has been written and is "in production" now. If you have an ISA RIO, or PCI card you're welcome to grab the patch. I still apppreciate hearing success stories or if you encoutered problems.
The support is currently for 2.2 kernels only. In a while I'll convert the driver for use under 2.3 kernels, and submit it to Linus and Alan. The driver is not yet included with newer kernels, but will hopefully be soon. You will still have to grab the specialix_riotools program suite from here.
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