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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: high-speed slip/ppp reliability Date: 20 Feb 1994 16:22:53 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 44 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Feb20112253@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <1994Feb18.172307.17380@ticipa.pac.sc.ti.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: rmfowler@landru.mtc.ti.com's message of 18 Feb 94 17:23:07 GMT [I apologize if the following sounds like a flame, but people ask about sio, and I feel that a concrete an answer is required. This is how I see it.] In article <1994Feb18.172307.17380@ticipa.pac.sc.ti.com> rmfowler@landru.mtc.ti.com (Rex Fowler) writes: Most of the documentation and comparisons I've seen between freebsd and netbsd seem to agree that the serial throughput on freebsd is more reliable than netbsd. Is this still true in the *-current trees? I'm not completely convinced that it has ever been true. I regularly communicate with people running `high'-speed SLIP and PPP links with NetBSD (though admittedly I think all of these people use 16550A-based ports). `high' == 38.4K and 57.6K CPU-to-modem, generally. That said, there are some small improvements that could be made to the com driver (in particular double buffering would help with FIFOless chips, though not as much as some people claim), but I have serious technical problems with sio. It requires changes to the tty system that no other *BSD* tty driver of any sort (including here the drivers in the two 4.4 ports that were donated to us, and the various other NetBSD ports) has required and some of which are very suspicious, and in general it ignores standard interfaces for managing ttys and tty buffers. Furthermore, obvious bogons like: #define setsofttty() (ipending |= 1 << 4) /* XXX */ just don't settle well with me. I'm happy for anyone who finds sio useful, but I really cannot justify putting it in NetBSD. BTW, the double buffering is not hard to do. It's on one of my (many) lists, but anyone is welcome to do it. -- - Charles Hannum NetBSD group Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sparc, mac68k, pc532. In progress: pmax, sun3.