*BSD News Article 37493


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From: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.linux.development,comp.os.linux.misc,sci.electronics
Subject: Re: 16550 detection
Date: 5 Nov 1994 07:19:50 +1100
Organization: Kralizec Dialup Unix Sydney - +61-2-837-1183, v.32bis v.42bis
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <39e516$5s3@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
References: <m0r2XH0-000MhFC@kitana> <JKH.94Nov1231956@freefall.cdrom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.zeta.org.au

In article <JKH.94Nov1231956@freefall.cdrom.com>,
Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com> wrote:
>In article <m0r2XH0-000MhFC@kitana> kitana!sysop@caprica.com (JL Gomez) writes:
>
>   I've e-mail someone using a BOCA 2016 using 8 ports at 115K what their
>   load was on the CPU.
>
>   He replied 3% under Linux.  Says alot about the serial driver.
>
>Or a lot about creative statistics.  8 ports doing 115.2K continuous.

It says that the 8 ports weren't going at full speed or that the the
overhead wasn't measured accurately.  The ISA bus overhead alone is
more than 10 times that:

	(8 ports) * (2 directions) * (11520 cps) = 230400 cps
	* (about 1.25 usec to to read each character from the bus)
	= 230400 usec/sec = 23% overhead
	  + (8 ports) * (1 direction) * 11520
	  * (about 1.25 usec to read the error status for each char input)
	= 34.5% overhead

>I'm not knocking Linux, but I'd distrust claims like this under FreeBSD
>just as highly.  People are very often prone to make them after the

On a 486DX2/66 with 16550's, FreeBSD-1.1.5 and Linux-1.1.12 and later
versions have almost exactly the same serial load, 2.5 to 3 times the
minimum calculated above.
-- 
Bruce Evans  bde@zeta.org.au