Brad Walker said:

>The serial port doesn't do input H/W flow control properly. It
>has a 1 character buffer with a 1 char. in the bit shift register.
>And we still get character overflows with NetBSD. So what's your
>point..

It appears to me that the com drivers in NetBSD/Sun3 1.2 and in
SunOS 3.5 (which used clists rather than ring buffers) have a
performance edge over SunOS 4.x or 5.x.

>Based upon what??

Based on the woes of many people who have written drivers for SVR4
and didn't get the performance that they expected.

>Agreed.. Though there are things I like about it. But hey, I enjoy
>using a Newton and a PC. Everything has faults..

In my last job I was shouldered with the burden of keeping ~600
software engineers happily hacking on Solaris 2.3-2.5.  I've seen
numerous zs3 ring buffer overflows that would lock up the display
for as long as 30 minutes.  These machines were typically doing
software builds, running dbx, and the usual assortment of desktop
apps.  They weren't even using the serial ports.  In the integration
labs, where Air Traffic Control systems were debugged, heavy use of
the serial ports for flight strip printers, etc, the impact of ring
buffer overflows could be seen as being devastating to the landing
of aircraft.

The STREAMS based Lachman TCP/IP is inferior to the old SunOS 4.x
TCP/IP. (the *!#&$^ LANCE chips don't help, either.)

There are three things that I like about NetBSD.  It's BSD, it has
been remarkably stable for me, and it runs on a lot of platforms.

I hope it stays that way.
-- 
Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.com	    rmk@tencats.rmkhome.com
                http://tencats.rmkhome.com