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Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 10:47:56 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199505240047.KAA01577@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com, julian@ref.tfs.com
Subject: Re: Cyclades Driver/Multi-port Serial Card
Cc: bde@freefall.cdrom.com, br\ian@med\iac\ity.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
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>>> > I wrote cyb which is not alpha.  It is production and in use by ISPs
>>> > all over the place.  I submitted to FreeBSD several times, but it has
>>> > never been integrated into the distribution.  I've asked several times
>>> > about it and got no response.

I responded several times.  Communications didn't seem to be working, so
I gave up and rewrote the NetBSD driver.  Diffs are 100K (2.5 times as
large as the original driver).  I intend to make even larger changes so
that all the serial drivers use a common front end.  cy.c currently has
about 30K of code (out of 60K total) in common with sio.c.  rc.c and
cy.c are very similar.  They drive similar Cirrus Logic chips and are
based on sio.c for the non-hardware parts.

>I've left this in Bruce's hands for the last few months, given that he
>actually has a Cyclades board to test and I've not the first idea
>about it myself.

Development was halted by the code freeze about a month ago.  The driver
is missing mainly configuration stuff for 16-port boards, sending of
breaks, variation of the fifo threshold at low speeds so that mouses
work OK.  It is likely to have some bugs involving misuse of the
hardware "intelligence".  Use of ttyinput() limits the benefits to be
gained from hardware intelligence to approximately 0%, and I don't care
much about cooked mode so I don't intend to fix this except when
ttyinput() can be avoided completely.

Bruce