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Will the Serial Console Ever Die?

Posted by kdawson on from the can-you-say-are-ess-two-three-two dept.

simpz writes "Will the serial port as a console connection ever be displaced — especially for devices such as switches, routers, SAN boxes, etc.? In one sense it's a simple connection. But it is the only current port that, in order to use, you need to know about wiring / baud rates / parity, etc. It has non-standard pinouts. And it is becoming too slow to upload firmware to dead devices, as the firmware updates get larger. Also, the serial port is rapidly disappearing from new laptops — which is where you often really need it, in data centers. Centronics, PS/2, and current loop are mostly defunct. Is there any sign on the horizon of a USB console connection?"

3 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It should have been phased out... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Screw that. I do programming for embedded systems and serial is absolutely essential. Even the simplest bootloader supports standard serial. Hell, you can write an implementation of rs232 in an fpga in about 20 minutes. Its ubiquitous because requires no real software to make it work...and when you have barely any software working on a system, that uart can be the difference between hours and weeks of debugging.

  2. Offshore Survey Industry by ss_teven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work in the offshore survey industry (oil/gas industry), and 95% of products to date still come with serial ports. They are critical for our purposes, and onboard com ports are a must for timing critical jobs such as multibeam bathymetric surveys.

    Current project im working on we are using Moxa multiport serial boards w/ 32 serial ports on this pc with around 25 currently inuse for IO. (Historically used Digi boards but they were awful for timing (relatively!), 30ms delay compared to the near 0ms on the Moxa units.)

    Simple to use, easily available, and cheap. Almost all the devices I work with use standard parity/stop bits etc, just varying baud rates, which is easy enough to remember.

    --
    like a fox..
  3. RS232 is fee-free by Andrew+Sterian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From a device manufacturer's point of view, RS232 is free to implement. No special drivers are required on the host.

    Now, for USB, you have to either pony up $2000 PER YEAR to the USB implementers forum to get your own VID/PID and distribute a driver to your customers (and deal with the resulting customer service issues) or add a chip from FTDI (or similar) and piggyback on their VID/PID but then ask your customers to download and install a generic driver that does not specifically identify your hardware.

    Gimme RS232 any day.