Unable to install driver for serial/parallel port card on Suse Leap 15.2 with Kernel 5.3.18-lp152.84-default

Question

I have an IOCREST SI-PEX50103 which is a PCI-Express Multi I/O Controller Card with 2 serial ports and 1 parallel port. It uses the vendor supplied AX99100 driver. I am running openSUSE Leap 15.2 with Kernel 5.3.18-lp152.84-default.

I have not been able to install the AX99100 driver on this Linux installation. When running the make command from the installation source directory, I get the following error message:

CC [M] /home/programming/iocrest/AX99100_LINUX_Driver_v1.0.0_Source/ax99100.o /home/programming/iocrest/AX99100_LINUX_Driver_v1.0.0_Source/ax99100.c: In function ‘receive_chars_dma_done’: /home/programming/iocrest/AX99100_LINUX_Driver_v1.0.0_Source/ax99100.c:1027:43: error: ‘ch’ undeclared (first use in this function) if (uart_handle_sysrq_char(&up->port, ch)) ^~ /home/programming/iocrest/AX99100_LINUX_Driver_v1.0.0_Source/ax99100.c:1027:43: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in

Before upgrading to Leap 15.2, I had openSUSE Leap 15.1 installed on this computer and I had no trouble installing the driver and using this card. Right now, I also have CentOS Linux 7 installed on this computer and I can install the driver and use the card on that installation.

I'm guessing there is some sort of a problem with the Kernel sources for the 5.3.18-lp152.84 kernel I am running. Any ideas you might have for locating the problem would be appreciated.

Answer 1

UPDATE -- Had to revert grub to Linux Header kernel 5.4.0-110-low-latency and edit typos in make & install driver

Okay so I finally got this to work on contacting the vendor (StarTech) support...

1. Vendor indicated that they tested on Linux Kernel header 5.4.0-110 for Ubuntu 20.04LTS.

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install linux-headers-5.4.0-110 -y
   

   • update /etc/default/grub to boot to 5.4.0-110-low-latency by default vs whatever the latest that ships with Ubuntu / SUSE

2. Download the driver from https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/PEX1P2, fix typos in make file (vendor admitted this is a known issue). Really the main issue error for ax99100.c make install throws undeclared ch, this is resolvable by simply declaring in the script:

    char ch;
    if (uart_handle_sysrq_char(&up->port, ch))
    ...

3. The driver build make command should now work, then on your make install command there is a missing line given the kernel directory doesn't exist. I added this with mkdir -p ... and make install works

4. Finally, to load the driver there is a command with io & io_high... run sudo lspci -v to get your hexadecimal port values assigned for the new parallel port hardware (in my case, e010 & e000). You need to convert those hexadecimal to decimal to pass as arguments (online converter here: https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/hex-to-decimal.html)

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ORIGINAL

Interestingly I ran into the same exact error and was so glad to see another user recently experienced. Our setup

• Dell OptiPlex 9020
• Ubuntu 20.04LTS, kernel 5.4.13 (you can run uname -r to check)
• StarTech PCiE Parallel Port

On running their provided installation script from here, there are some errors...

Notably you need to change the SUBDIR=$(PWD) to M=$(shell pwd) to even run sudo make, but then you get the ch undeclared error... My thought was this is a typo / bad maintenance from the StarTech team that updates the driver Makefile.

I pinged StarTech's chat support sharing these details and they suggested the following for potential missing dependencies

Can you please give the following a shot and let me know if it works for you.

• We’ve tested these steps when getting a similar error on a Ubuntu 20.04 machine running Kernel 5.4.0-113 and it seemed to work fine.

• In the Makefile make sure $(PWD) is changed to $(shell pwd) in both spots (Sometimes needed depending on the customers configuration)

• Then try:

  sudo apt-get install linux-source
  sudo apt-get install build-essential
  sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib
  sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev:i386
  sudo apt-get install linux-headers-5.4.0-110:i386
  sudo apt-get install linux-headers-5.4.0-110
  

• Try this command if the above does not work

  sudo ln -s /usr/include/asm-generic /usr/include/asm 
  

  • Making the link to tell the compiler that asm-generic is also asm since that may be part of the problem

• At the end, just in case:

  sudo apt-get update        

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Like I said, on our end this seemed to install the card without facing any errors. Let me know if you have any questions or if this works for you.

Answer 2

We had a similar problem on Rocky Linux kernel 5.14. discussion here

The Startech driver compiled after adding "const" to one argument in ax99100_sp.c.

static void serial99100_set_termios(struct uart_port *port, struct ktermios *termios, const struct ktermios *old)

"modprobe" failed until we turned off Secure Boot in the BIOS. Now dmesg shows ttyF0 and ttyF1.