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Hello,

On Jan 7, 2007, at 21:59, Donald Lee wrote:

> For what I want - web and ftp server, shell users, ppp dial-up - will
> 3.1 (or 4.x) be a big improvement?

Maybe, maybe not.
Up to 2.0 the serial ports on Old World machines were pretty much 
unusable due to excessive interrupt lossage that would sooner or later 
lead to a deadlock. We rewrote much of the interrupt handling so things 
should be much better in 3.0. Well, at least if the interrupt problem 
was the only trouble with them.
For the records - with the rewritten interrupt code I transferred a few 
hundred MB between an S900 and an AIX box at 38.4 kBit/s ( because that 
was the maximum the AIX box allowed ) at steady 4kB/s via zmodem ( 
using xon/xoff handshaking ) without a single retry, both ways.
I remember getting about 5000 interrupts per second with that, so the 
driver is certainly not optimal ( shouldn't it support DMA on at least 
a few machines as well? )

have fun
Michael
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