Serial HOWTO

• Index
• Introduction
• Quick Help
• How the Hardware Transfers Bytes
• Serial Port Basics
• Is the Serial Port Obsolete?
• Multiport Serial Boards/Cards/Adapters
• Servers for Serial Ports
• Configuring Overview
• Locating the Serial Port: IO address, IRQs
• Configuring the Serial Driver (high-level) "stty"
• Serial Port Devices /dev/tts/2 = /dev/ttyS2, etc.
• Interesting Programs You Should Know About
• Speed (Flow Rate)
• Locking Out Others
• Serial Communications Programs And Utilities
• Serial Tips And Miscellany
• Troubleshooting
• Interrupt Problem Details
• What Are UARTs? How Do They Affect Performance?
• Pinout and Signals
• Voltage Waveshapes
• Other Serial Devices (not async RS-232)
• Other Sources of Information
• Appendix A: Obsolete Hardware/Software

23. Other Sources of Information

23.1 Books

1. Axleson, Jan: Serial Port Complete, Lakeview Research, Madison, WI, 1998.
2. Black, Uyless D.: Physical Layer Interfaces & Protocols, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1996.
3. Campbell, Joe: The RS-232 Solution, 2nd ed., Sybex, 1982.
4. Campbell, Joe: C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications, 2nd ed., Unknown Publisher, 1993.
5. Levine, Donald: POSIX Programmer's Guide, O'Reilly, 1991.
6. Nelson, Mark: Serial Communications Developer's Guide, 2nd ed., Hungry Minds, 2000.
7. Putnam, Byron W.: RS-232 Simplified, Prentice Hall, 1987.
8. Seyer, Martin D.: RS-232 Made Easy, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 1991.
9. Stevens, Richard W.: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, (ISBN 0-201-56317-7; Addison-Wesley)
10. Tischert, Michael & Bruno Jennrich: PC Intern, Abacus 1996. Chapter 7: Serial Ports

Notes re books:

1. "... Complete" has hardware details (including register) but the programming aspect is Window oriented.
2. "Physical Layer ..." covers much more than just RS-232.

23.2 Serial Software

If it's not available in your Linux distribution try:
Serial Software for Linux software for the serial ports including getty and port monitors.
Serial Communications for communication programs.

• irqtune will give serial port interrupts higher priority to improve performance. Using hdparm for hard-disk tuning may help some more.
• modemstat and statserial show the current state of various modem control lines. See Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics

23.3 Related Linux Documents

• man pages for: setserial and stty
• Low-Level Terminal Interface part of "GNU C Library Reference manual" (in libc (or glibc) docs package). It covers the detailed meaning of "stty" commands, etc.
• Modem-HOWTO: modems on the serial port
• PPP-HOWTO: help with PPP (using a modem on the serial port)
• Printing-HOWTO: for setting up a serial printer
• Serial-Programming-HOWTO: for some aspects of serial-port programming
• Text-Terminal-HOWTO: how they work and how to install and configure
• UPS-HOWTO: setting up UPS sensors connected to your serial port
• UUCP-HOWTO: for information on setting up UUCP

23.4 Usenet newsgroups:

• comp.os.linux.answers
• comp.os.linux.hardware: Hardware compatibility with the Linux operating system.
• comp.os.linux.networking: Networking and communications under Linux.
• comp.os.linux.setup: Linux installation and system administration.

23.5 Serial Mailing List

The Linux serial mailing list. To join, send email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org, with ``subscribe linux-serial'' in the message body. If you send ``help'' in the message body, you get a help message. The server also serves many other Linux lists. Send the ``lists'' command for a list of mailing lists.

23.6 Internet

• Linux Serial Driver home page Includes info about PCI support.
• Serial-Programming-HOWTO (not yet available from the Linux Documentation Project). It's now on my website: http://www.lafn.org/~dave/linux/Serial-Programming-HOWTO.txt See also: Serial-Programming-HOWTO by Peter Baumann
• Terminal IO by Vern Hoxie Termios man page revision by Vern Hoxie
• A white paper discussing serial communications and multiport serial boards was available from Cyclades at http://www.cyclades.com.
• Serial and UART Tutorial (FreeBSD)