I'm running Indigo on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X Server 10.5.8.

I believe that the FTDI drivers that the 2412U/2413U use are buggy. I would like to know what people's experience is with the FTDI drivers, specifically if they see kernel panics, hung systems, or other issues.

If I have two FTDI based devices, I see kernel panics or hung systems about once or twice a month. If I have three FTDI based devices, I see kernel panics more frequently, at least once a week to daily. The three devices are: 2413U, The Energy Detective, and the LinkUSB.

When I do get kernel panics, they are always in the FTDI driver, with IndigoServer as the process that it crashed in (I don't fault IndigoServer, though).

I believe I've seen a kernel panic or hard freeze once or twice, but that was when unplugging an FTDI device while the serial connection was open. That didn't surprise me too much, since it causes a failure case code path to be followed in the driver code, which is less likely to have been QA'd thoroughly. I have never had a kernel panic or hard freeze in the driver though on my main home server running Indigo with the 2413U -- it has been incredibly stable.

support wrote:I believe I've seen a kernel panic or hard freeze once or twice, but that was when unplugging an FTDI device while the serial connection was open. That didn't surprise me too much, since it causes a failure case code path to be followed in the driver code, which is less likely to have been QA'd thoroughly. I have never had a kernel panic or hard freeze in the driver though on my main home server running Indigo with the 2413U -- it has been incredibly stable.

One FTDI device then? PPC or Intel?

The number of devices may be important, since it could be a concurrency issue.

On my main home server which never has problems, it is just the 2413U on a G4 PPC.

On my dev machine (Intel) I periodically run multiple FTDI devices and have never seen that panic/crash during normal operation. But most of the time I just have a single FTDI device (2412/2413/etc.) plugged in.

My production server (dual G5, 10.5.8) is also rock solid, but only has one FTDI device (2413). My development machine (quad Intel, 10.6.4) has two FTDI devices, but they aren't used at the same time, so it might very well be a concurrency issue with multiple devices.

My production machine does have 3 other keyspan adaptors which run concurrently with no problem (just as a point of information).

jay wrote:My production machine does have 3 other keyspan adaptors which run concurrently with no problem (just as a point of information).

I assume they don't use the FTDI driver?

jamus wrote:I assume they don't use the FTDI driver?

Nope, Keyspan (Tripplite) drivers.