> I purchased a AST 4-port today which will be used in a router soon.
> I would like to know wether I should better use it as 4 normal
> serial ports or in the advanced interrupt sharing mode. The router
> has enough interrupts free so that's not the point. Which solution
> gives the best performance and the lowest risc of losing characters?

Shared interrupt is the better mode.   One interrupt overhead can
service several fifos.  That versus an interrupt overhead per-fifo.
The ast handler re-examines the per-fifo interrupts as it
processes the interrupt; heavy traffic on multiple lines may have
even less overhead than that!

bolo