Perle Speed 4 (+)
Perle I/O8+ (ISA/PCI)
Perle SI/XIO/SX (ISA/PCI)
Perle RIO (ISA/PCI)
Perle PCI-Fast (2.4.x kernel)
Perle PCI-RAS v.90

The UltraPort, PCI-RAS v.92 and Speed LE cards currently requires the perle-serial kernel module to be installed.

Required kernel parameters:

Kernel config for 2.4.x

Character Devices ->
[*] Extended dumb serial device options
[*] Support more than 4 serial ports
[*] Support for sharing interrupts
[*] Support special multiport boards (note: for I/O8+, SX, and RIO cards)

Kernel config for 2.6.x

Device Drivers -> Character Devices ->
[*] Non-standard serial port support (note: for I/O8+, SX, or RIO cards in non-SMP kernels)
serial drivers ->
<*> 8250/16550 and compatible serial support
[*] Extended 8250/16550 serial driver options
[*] Support more than 4 legacy serial ports
[*] Support for sharing serial interrupts
[*] Support special multiport boards

The Speed 4, PCI-Fast (2.4.x kernels), and PCI-RAS v.90 use the Linux serial drivers, so no additional driver is required to be enabled.

The following cards require to be enabled in the kernel. Creating a module [M] is the prefered method. To enable kernel configuration you must enable the following:

I/O8+

[M] Specialix IO8+ card support

SI/XIO/SX

[M] Specialix SX (and SI) card support

RIO

[M] Specialix RIO system support

If you are not familiar with rebuilding the kernel/modules then please contact the Support group of the Linux distribution you have purchased (or their support website). You can also obtain How-To documents from the Linux Documentation Project website (see link below).

Note: some Linux distributions will have these character device settings enabled as a default so no kernel/module recompile may be required.

You can quickly check to see if the module has been incorporated by running the modprobe command to load the module after the card has been installed:
I/O8+
# modprobe specialix
SI/XIO/SX
# modprobe sx
RIO
# modprobe rio
Ultraport/PCI-RAS
# modprobe perle-serial

If this command returns an error then the module is not supported and the kernel must be rebuilt.

Refer to the Perle User Guide for further details on configuration.