Dave Burgess drunkenly mumbled...
> 

NetBSD routing issue:

i'm not going to touch this until i get NetBSD on my 386 first.  plus, i just
might drag Brad Spencer over to my house and do things that way since it's
easier to have live help as opposed to doing things through mail (and who knows
i just might break my ability to get and send mail in the process, then i'm
screwed)

> Any good 16550 card should work, since you are not likely to use more
> than the 115200 the cards now are capable of.  Of course, having said
> that, it will be proven wrong....

well, here's my opinion of that.  you can push a 16550 to 115K.  (sorta) and
i look at it this way: the USR does hardware compression so i'm pushing a
compressed 56k stream through the phone line, but the modem uncompresses the
stream before sending it to the computer.  uncompressed 56k is going to be
damn close to 115k uncompressed.  it fits inside the serial port abilities.
great. cool. sorta.  the CPU is still heavily involved, the FIFO on a 16550
is 16 bytes.  so i only have a 16 bytes window to save my butt (for both
directions) whereas the Hayes ESP has two 1024 bytes buffers, one for each
direction as well as it's own CPU to handle serial communications.  the max
transfer rate you can push through the ESP is in the range of 900K in comparison
to the 16550's 115K.  remember this is an overworked 386, so a 16550 probably
won't work to the best of it's ability.  also, when modem speeds increase
(as i'm sure they will) or if i descide to go to 128K ISDN, the 16550 has just
become the bottleneck.  as it is the 16550 might not be a bottleneck, but a
Hayes ESP card only cost's $60 or so.  well worth the relatively small price
to insure that the serial line isn't the bottleneck, ever.

in short, i'd rather spend $60 now and not have to deal with this issue later
when it might just become a big problem.

> > thanks a million, maybe NetBSD will run on my vax and sun3 hardware one day as
> > well.  :)
> 
> Doesn't it already?

yep, just about all sun3 hardware can run it (sun3x is now supported) and most
of the VAX hardware i own will run it (with the exception of the VAX 11/730
which still isn't supported, which is fine, i would like one VMS system) the
VAXstation 2000 is even working well (so i've heard, haven't had time to get
NetBSD on my vs2k yet).

> Dave Burgess  (The man of a thousand E-Mail addresses)
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                 aren't wel all??? :)

> *bsd FAQ Maintainer / SysAdmin for the NetBSD system in my spare bedroom

maintainer of several FAQ's i haven't gotten around to writing yet. *sigh*

> "Just because something is stupid doesn't mean there isn't someone that 
> doesn't want to do it...."

too true.

-brian

-- 
The fundamental difference between Unix and the Macintosh operating system is
that Unix was designed to please programmers, whereas the Mac was designed to 
please users. (Windows, on the other hand, was designed to please accountants, 
but that's another story.)
				--The UNIX-HATERS Handbook

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