Howdy!

I'm pleased to announce that we seem to have fixed the serial port
problems. The current source on ftp.netbsd.org should be correct.

The problem turns out that we misunderstood how to set up the interrupt
levels (spltty specifically). We were turning off interrupts to the
chip when we should only have been turning off the passing of data to
the kernel. We were supposed to stop characters coming out of a
temporary buffer (the ring buffer) when infact we were stopping characters
entering it. Thus it never did much, and we got lots of errors. :-(

I've gotten ppp to work very solidly. I've transfered a couple of meg
over the line w/o a single fifo error. :-)

The changed file is sys/arch/mac68k/include/param.h. Note that changing
it will mean a lot of the kernel needs re-compiling.

noud de brouwer, who is running a neighborhood ISP has used it, and gotten
some very impressive numbers. Like over 6k bytes/sec. :-)

WARNING about high speeds: If, while transfering data at over say 28800
(non-scientifically-picked number), you want to do something else, like
compile, log in elsewhere, or use ethernet, you might have problems.
You might not. Every time a byte gets received, the CPU has to drop
what it's doing, save what it's doing, get the byte, store it, and
resume what you're doing. It's life w/o DMA. :-( It works, but takes
a bit of CPU. Just be aware.

Also, I've got GhostScript to work with my DeskWriter printer. There's
one other change to the kernel that was needed for this, and it's
in sys/kern/tty.c. Basically echo wan't getting turned off right. Now
it is, and the DW works fine.

To get gs to work, after applying the two above patches, just download
my stuff from ftp:puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us/pub/NetBSD/contrib/gs.

gs262.mac68k.tgz is a gzipped tar file containing my gs binary, the
changed source files, all the files needed to install gs, some documetation,
and nenscript, a freeware version of enscript. The documentation is
still rough, and someone is looking at it for me to see how bad it is. :-)

ghostscript-fonts-2.6.2.tgz is a BUNCH of PS fonts to make gs more useful.

The other two files are source code. You don't need thm, but you might want
them. :-)

So try them out & let me know what you think.

Take care,

Bill