ranting on serial I/O cards

[david nugent]

In a message of <Feb 23 23:18>, Stuart Lynne writes:

 >On Xenix even using 16450's will work for one or two Trailblazers quite
 >nicely. On my system (25Mhz 386) I didn't really notice a tremendous load.
 >
 >With 16550's I have run three Trailblazers and three 2400 Hayes with little
 >loading and no character loss problems.


Unless the serial driver is written specifically to handle and will enable the 16550's FIDO queues, then the CPU overhead is the same as for 16450, so you shouldn't notice any difference at all.  Running a 16550AN without it's FIFOs "disabled" (well, the FIFO's themselves are always enabled, except the IRQ trigger levels are set at 1) will however aleviate some character loss in itself, since the FIFO is still present, and receive overruns become more rare.


david


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