[SOLVED] /dev/parport not there any more

Question

See my final post for "solution"
Original question:
I'm a fairly new newbie to kernel issues.
/dev/parport is no longer showing up.  It's been several months since I've used it. (I use it for bit banging a microcontroller - which worked great several months ago)
Can someone give me suggestions on how to start back tracking what has changed?   I'm sorry for the open ended question.  But, it just kinda worked before and I didn't need to know how /dev/parport got created.  I just used it bit-banging away with avrdude and all worked fine.
Now, no /dev/parport on bootup.
lsmod shows no parport or parport_pc or ppdev
If I modprobe ppdev, then parport and ppdev show up in lsmod report, but there is still no /dev/parport
Hopefully, this is a no-brainer and I need to just create some /dev entry or something like that and the normal boot up process will connect everything up and start the right modules.
What's frustrating is that is was there several months ago - working fine.  Of course I've done pacman -Syu since then - without much attention to details.
Thanks for you patient consideration of my hopefully silly question
TheGipp
Last edited by TheGipp (2013-09-02 23:31:47)

Answer 1

Lone_Wolf,
dmesg | grep parport reports nothing.  There is no reference to parport or ppdev in the dmesg output.
lspci -vvv reports the following:
04:05.0 Communication controller: MosChip Semiconductor Technology Ltd. PCI 9835 Multi-I/O Controller (rev 01)
    Subsystem: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 1P2S
    Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx-
    Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
    Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 17
    Region 0: I/O ports at ccc8 [size=8]
    Region 1: I/O ports at ccd0 [size=8]
    Region 2: I/O ports at ccd8 [size=8]
    Region 3: I/O ports at cce0 [size=8]
    Region 4: I/O ports at cce8 [size=8]
    Region 5: I/O ports at ccf0 [size=16]
    Kernel driver in use: serial
    Kernel modules: parport_serial
I'm not sure what all of that means.  But there is no reference to the parallel port.  Too bad, I don't have that type of printout from when it worked six months ago.
The card is a Rosewill RC303  - 2 serial ports and 1 parallel port.  Is "Region 5" above the parallel port?
Like I said earlier WindowsXP thinks it's ok.  So, either Windows didn't check well or Arch/udev is missing some aspect of the PCI card that it used to find on bootup.
any ideas on how to dig more?
Last edited by TheGipp (2013-09-02 15:47:52)