Even if I don't make me a lot of friends, the au1x00 driver seems to be a hack.
Well, it basically is.
Most of the difference seems to be the PCI stuff, that has been removed and the access method.
There were a bunch of differences including how you program the baud rate, the addresses of the registers, and if I remember correctly, additional/different registers. To cleanly get the au1x support into the 8250 driver, some additional abstraction was necessary and I just never had the time to do it.
Pete