[ECOS] Serial Port Question.(Help needed!)

["Ling Su" <lingsu at palmmicro dot com>]

Dear All,

Recently I have met some problem with the serial port driver on NEC VRC4373.
I use serial 0 for GDB debugging, and serial port 1 for communication with
PC. In the testing stage, it works well. When I do some intensive work, the
serial port 1 will easily got stucked. I found it is due to the PC writes to
this port while the applicaiton on board trying to send something back.
Looks like some conflicts happened. Is this a reasonable guess?

I check the vrc4373 board document, I found the RTS/CTS signals are not
connected, so hardware flow control is not allowed. I wonder if software
flow control can solve this problem, since it is not caused by buffer
overflow.

Based on above assumption, I thought if I can switch serial port 0 and
serial port 1, and turn on hardware flow control for serial port 0, it could
be working. But I am not sure if GDB stub can work on a serial port 1 which
has no hardware flow control, anybody can kindly shed me some light on this?

Since when I run the eCosconfig windows tools, I found the hardware flow
control for serial port is greyed, I wonder if the hardware flow control can
be turned on without modifying the serial driver for Z85c30. Can I forced to
enable the hardware flow control directly?

Thanks for any kindly assistances!

Rgds,
-Ling
(BTW, I have sent two emails regarding to vrc4373 and vrc4375, unfortunately
got no reply till now, anyone has this experience, please let me know. Right
now I am working on a platform which is obselete, I don't know if I should
transfter to another platform. Of course, I will try to port eCos on vrc4375
in current stage. Any helpful inputs can speeds up this work, I guess. :))