>Hello,
>
>> With serial, I think the main problem is that it is just not
>> used much, so few people care enough to make it work.
>
>The problem with onboard serial ports on macppc were purely
>interrupt-related as far as I can tell, when we overhauled the interrupt
>handling code about a year ago the serial ports suddenly became usable.
>I couldn't test more than 38400 bps but sending a couple megs back and
>forth at that speed didn't generate a single zmodem retransmit. The old
>code would simply lose LOTS of interrupts, it was sort of stable up to a
>few hundred interrupts per second but apparently the way the current
>driver handles the ports will generate a few thousand interrupts per
>second when transferring data at higher speeds ( no idea if it uses DMA
>- probably not ). The new code is definitely in 3.0 and I /think/ it's
>been pulled into 2.1 as well.
>
>have fun
>Michael

This is good news.

This is consistent with my experience with my Cyclades cards.  (8-port serial)

I've been running with mods to the cyclades driver.  Most of them are
fairly minor.  The one that made things work was where I added a "manual"
call to the interrupt handler from a poll loop in the "upper half"
of the driver.  Without this, the driver would lock up under load.
I had suspected that it was losing interrupts, but could not find a
way from within the driver to fix it, short of this hack.

With the hack, it works fine, except that the performance is submarvelous,
and it sort-of goes in fits and starts sometimes.

I'm anxious to try out 2.1/3.0 now.

-dgl-