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Date:      Sat, 4 Jun 2005 21:44:14 +1000 (EST)
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        Bernd Luevelsmeyer <bdluevel@heitec.net>
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org, FreeBSD-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: kern/81807: Silo overflows with serial multiport cards
Message-ID:  <20050604211741.X5959@delplex.bde.org>
In-Reply-To: <200506021248.j52CmUV4002914@edgar.admin.er.heitec.net>
References:  <200506021248.j52CmUV4002914@edgar.admin.er.heitec.net>

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On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Bernd Luevelsmeyer wrote:

>> Description:
> The machine has 3 serial 8-port-cards installed, 2 of them ISA cards
> and one PCI card. The card model of all 3 of them is Moxa SmartIO
> C168H (http://www.moxa.com/Product/C168H.htm and
> http://www.moxa.com/Product/C168HPCI.htm). Since Upgrading to
> 5-Stable the ISA cards have high numbers of silo overflows. This did
> not happen with 4-Stable.
> The overflows happened with SCHED_4BSD or SCHED_ULE, with and
> without PREEMPTION in the kernel, and regardless of baudrate (I
> tried 9600 and 115200). Also I tried several HZ values in the kernel
> (100, 1000 and 4000), and it didn't matter.
>
> The machine is a PII with 300 MHz. Now this isn't the most powerful
> (and ISA is a little bit old-fashioned), but the effect happens also
> when only one of the 24 ports is used and it's at 9600 Baud, and
> anyway with 4-Stable there was no problem at all.

Interrupt handling is bad in -current but not usually that bad.  The
loss of performance was in the 5-10% range when I tested it a lot on
a 366 MHz Celeron 12-18 months ago.  Latency increase is worse than
performance decrease but wasn't noticeable with <= 8 ports at 115200.

> Here is the machine's dmesg:

Everything seems to be set up correctly.  sio even handles the isa
ports better that the pci ports.  I would have expected silo overflows
to occur for the pci ports first because fast interrupts are not used
for them (try using the PUC_FASTINTR option to fix this).  Interrupts
seem to be working at probe time.  Do they work later?  Use vmstat
or systat -v to check that some keep occurring.  Check that fast
interrupts are used by booting with -v.

Bruce



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