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Date:      Wed, 27 Nov 1996 14:22:26 +1000 (est)
From:      Greg Ungerer <gerg@stallion.oz.au>
To:        hardware@freebsd.org
Cc:        alex@yahoo.com, sos@ravenock.cybercity.dk, bde@zeta.org.au, Greg Ungerer <gerg@stallion.oz.au>, sysseh@devetir.qld.gov.au
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD as Terminal Server
Message-ID:   <9611271422.aa01993@cluster.stallion.oz.au>

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Hiya All,

Sorry for the late response on this...
(Hopefully the following attributions are correct, sorry if not :-)

Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> writes:
>>In reply to Alexander Winske who wrote:
>>> Howdy,
>>>  I'm looking to set up a largish terminal server on
>>> a FreeBSD box. (I want to log console output and allow
>>> console sessions with approx. 75-100 hosts).
>>> 
>>> Can anyone out there recommend a flavor of multiport
>>> serial card that will allow me to have that many ports?
>>> I would think that they wouldn't have to be doing more than
>>> 2400 baud each, if that makes any difference...
>
>3 * 32-port Cyclades boards should work OK at such a low speed,
>but are very expensive (list prices are US$1328 for a 32Ye (ISA)
>and $1537 for a 32YeP (PCI).  Discount prices seem to be slightly
>more than half the list prices).
>
>>Look at some of the newer Stallion boards, I think they support
>>upto 64 ports per card, so two of them should have you
>>rolling.

Yeah that is right. The EasyConnection 8/64 can do up to 64 ports
per bus slot (ISA, EISA, and MCA buses supported). The EasyConnection
8/32 PCI board will also go up to 64 ports (don't you just love
the names marketing comes up with ;-).

The 8/64 is a real intelligent board with off-board CPU and large
buffer memory so perforamce tends to be very good. It does not use
interrupts to the host, so host overhead tends to be very low too.
64 ports at 2400 baud won't even start to work it hard.


>You'd need to translate the istallion driver from the Linlish :-).

Huh??
What do you mean?
How mush more FreeBSDish can it be made?


>The current version is too green to use.  It disables interrupts
>and calls tsleep() :-(.

I would hardly call it green, people have been using them very happily
for more than a year now...


>
>I did a quick check for drivers in isa/*.c that abuse disable_intr()
>and found these:
>
>ctx.c: disables interrupts and calls uiomove().  Apart from disabling
[driver list sniped]

Did you let of the maintainers of these drivers know so they could
"fix" up the problem?

In any case this is very easy to "fix" for the Stallion drivers. If you
look at a lot of the cases of the disabled interrupts they are turned off
for no more than a couple of dozen instructions...

Regards
Greg


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Ungerer                                       EMAIL: gerg@stallion.com
Stallion Technologies Pty Ltd                      PHONE:   +61 7 3270 4271
33 Woodstock Rd, Toowong, QLD 4066, Australia      FAX:     +61 7 3270 4245



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