Minimum requirements to enable PCMCIA serial card?

[Dag Bakke]

I have:
- a 4port serial PCMCIA card and box with a yenta-compatible cardbus 
bridge.
- a root fs containing uclibc, busybox and a static /dev.
- kernel 2.6.13-rc6


I would like to learn:
- What is the bare minimum I need to add to my root fs to get access to 
the 4 serial ports on this card? (Simply booting the kernel is 
insufficient. I get no indication that the ports are detected.)
- How difficult would it be to hack serial_cs.c to detect this card 
directly?

And yes, I have seen
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/pcmcia/howto.html

By reading that (and various postings on lkml) I get the impression I 
need everything + the kitchen sink *and* the icecubemachine:
udev, libsysfs, sysfsytils, libusb, hotplug, pcmciautils

Honestly, my target contains two cardbus sockets. And nothing will ever 
be hotplugged. What do I *need*?


Details for the card:
---------------------
The card shows up as
[ 6992.692737] ttyS1 at I/O 0x240 (irq = 5) is a 16550A
[ 6992.695578] ttyS2 at I/O 0x248 (irq = 5) is a 16550A
[ 6992.698237] ttyS3 at I/O 0x250 (irq = 5) is a 16550A
[ 6992.700924] ttyS4 at I/O 0x258 (irq = 5) is a 16550A
when running cardmgr on a laptop. Note the somewhat unusual port 
addresses (for serial ports).

It is an Advantech COMpad-32/85B-4, which in serial_cs.c is listed like 
this:
PCMCIA_DEVICE_CIS_PROD_ID12("ADVANTECH", "COMpad-32/85B-4", 0x96913a85, 
0xcec8f102, "COMpad4.cis")

This gives me an indication that something may want to read 
"COMpad4.cis", which
contains:
#
# Replacement CIS for Advantech COMpad-32/85B-4
#
dev_info
  NULL 0ns, 512b
vers_1 4.1, "ADVANTECH", "COMpad-32/85B-4"
funcid serial_port [post]
config base 0x0100 mask 0x0001 last_index 0x02
cftable_entry 0x01 [default]
  [mwait]
  io 0x0240-0x025f [lines=10] [8bit] [range]
  irq mask 0x9eb8 [level]
cftable_entry 0x02
  io 0x0340-0x035f [lines=10] [8bit] [range]


pcmcia-cs contains COMpad4.dat, not .cis. In /etc/pcmcia/cis/ ...

What is the relationship between .cis and .dat?
Which one goes into /lib/firmware/ when using the hotplug mechanism?
Or is it /lib/firmware/cis/ ?

Anyone ever seen a CardBus card with 4 serial ports..?


Thanks,

Dag B.