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Comment by wrl | Hacker News Reader

The FTDI OSX drivers will still randomly cause kernel panics when the device is unplugged and a program still holds an open file descriptor for the serial port. While working with a company which was developing and selling products with FTDI chips in them, we made FTDI aware of this issue and attached many panic logs.

It's been about 5 years and they've still yet to actually fix it.

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They luckily did fix this in a relatively recent version -- try updating your driver. Still crazy that it shipped in the first place like that.

EDIT: just realized that I was thinking of the PL2303, which had a similar issue, not FTDI.

The newest version I can find on their site says it's from 2012. Link?

Oops, was dealing with a similar issue with the Prolific 2303, which was dealt with by using a newer driver, I haven't run into the issue yet with FTDI (which I don't as much).

Bummer. The FTDI driver crashes my mac quite frequently.

The funny thing is that we reported this sometime in 2009 (might have been 2010), they "fixed it" and released a new version, but the new version only crashed somewhat less often.

OS X ships with an FTDI driver since 10.9. I suspect this one is made by Apple. Maybe because of this kind of issues. Do you still have crashes on 10.9+?

Unfortunately, the Apple driver exhibits the same issue. It also doesn't support the control lines on the FT232 (e.g, DSR/DTR, RTS/CTS).

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