From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Nov 9 21:55:42 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id VAA06164 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 9 Nov 1995 21:55:42 -0800 Received: from asstdc.scgt.oz.au (root@asstdc.scgt.oz.au [202.14.234.65]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id VAA06108 for ; Thu, 9 Nov 1995 21:53:14 -0800 Received: (from imb@localhost) by asstdc.scgt.oz.au (8.6.12/BSD-4.4) id QAA15021; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 16:50:30 +1100 From: michael butler Message-Id: <199511100550.QAA15021@asstdc.scgt.oz.au> Subject: Re: I/O woes. To: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 16:50:29 +1100 (EST) Cc: geoff@schwing.ginsu.com, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199511100413.WAA23738@brasil.moneng.mei.com> from "Joe Greco" at Nov 9, 95 10:13:42 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24beta] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2039 Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Joe Greco writes: > > My configuration is pretty standard. I'm using an older 486/33 with 16 > > megs of RAM and ISA bus. The ports are all controlled by 16550s. Do I > > have to do anything special to get them operating with the 16550s > > properly? I've got one modem hooking me to the internet via 28.8 modem > > and two dial-up 14.4 modems for user access. Kinda a micro ISP. ;) You should have little trouble with this .. > 1) you should ALWAYS use hardware flow control unless you have a REALLY good > reason not to. REALLY good, as in, the device you are talking to doesn't > support it. That's the ONLY reason not to. > 2) note, I don't know if the current getty in FreeBSD will allow you to set > this up "right". I've used my own severely hacked getty since the later > days of 386BSD/earlier days of FreeBSD because there was tons of lacking > functionality. Part of this was to add "proper" hardware handshaking > support because there was no gettytab flag to turn it on. I use mgetty because it does this and more .. it allows me to set the modems so that they don't auto-answer if the machine's down - saving my customer's phone bill connecting to a modem with nothing behind it. There's another motivation, however. All three -current machines I run accept inbound fidonet calls .. mgetty is the only getty (that I know of) which supports this. These machines are a 386DX/40 (Opti 386/WB), 486DX/33 (UMC) and 486DX2/66 (SiS) .. all fitted with 16550s and at least 16 meg of RAM. The only machine that gives me trouble is the 486DX/33 .. it will overflow the 16550 FIFOs if sio.c is left in "standard" form. Dropping the RX trigger point to 8 (line 1841 in -current) solved the problem. Another nit with (apparently) memory/cache timing on the same machine is yet to be fully resolved. All of them feed several newsfeeds with V.34/V.FC modems and are fed themselves via ISDN. Generally speaking, it works and it's proven to be more stable than the commercial platforms I've used in the past, michael