In message <199701201816.NAA03845@mimosa.com>, "D. Hugh Redelmeier" writes:
>I seem to remember hearing that there was a fair bit of care taken in
>SunOS (at least the early versions) to get as good performance as
>possible out of the Zilog chips.  I don't know if this "fell out" in
>later versions.  My picture is that there is a tight "first level"

Probably, because soon after, Sun introduced the MCP and ALM-2 boards.
These beasts use 8 8530s and an 85360 with some DMA controllers for
real serial communication. They also seem to have rather large (> 1K)
FIFOs. In my experience with this board, I have never seen dropped
characters at relatively high speeds and the system load is not
appreciably affected. The only drawback is that this card won't
really fit into a 3/60 (It's a 9U VME).

I don't believe that NetBSD supports this card. (Someone correct me
-- I haven't seen -current in a while.)

--Charles Lepple
charles@foo.org