Since January of 2007, I have been running NetBSD 2.1 with just a couple of
patches for my main web/ftp/shell/dial-up server.

The dial-up is via a Cyclades 8 port serial card and external modems.

The improvements in interrupt handling code (and other places) has
made a tremendous difference in NetBSD on my G3/G4 machine(s).
The ATA, memory management and serial performance have all improved
markedly.

In particular, I no longer have to carry around the non-trivial
hack I had for the Cyclades driver to make it work on MacPPC.
It now works fine.

More importantly, both reliability and performance of the ATA driver
is dramatically improved.  Very cool.

As I recall, I also ran this kernel on a couple of old-world machines,
and tested the serial port(s) with ppp to the G4, and they
ran flawlessly.  (though ppp is still a bit of a pain
at times to configure)

So this is one positive report, such as it is.

-dgl-

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>According to this ...
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>http://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/faq.html#badserial
>
>The serial ports on macppc are rather unstable.
>
>I can't find the date on the FAQ, so I don't know how long ago this assessment was made. Can we confirm if this is still the case?
>
>For what it's worth, I run 3.1.1_PATCH on a beige G3/333MHz (OF 2.4).
>
>What I'd like to do is hook up a null modem between the mac and a Wintel box so I could run SSH sessions from the Wintel side.
>
>From what I can see here ...
>
>http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3b.shtml
>
>It uses a DIN-8 GeoPort connector. The PC has a DB9 port. I'm still trying to trace down a cable that could link the two boxes, but does anybody have experience with a hook-up like this? Does it work?
>
>TIA,
>
>- -- Pierre Dubuc
>pldubuc@yahoo.ca
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