Anvil Serial Boards -- cheap trash or what?

[Karl Denninger]

In article <2562 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at ddsw1.UUCP (Karl Denninger) writes:
>We have just acquired an Anvil Designs 8-port I/O board. 

>The problem we're seeing is (rediculously low throughput on input....lost
>characters)..
>
>One good thing about this board is that it came with a nice diagnostic that
>allows me to place the blame where it belongs.  
>
>This board is rated for 8 ports @ 9600 baud in throughput.  That means I 
>should be able to run 4 19200 lines -- at 19200 -- and not lose anything!  

The following is an update on the status here:

o Anvil was notified of the problem on Tuesday morning.  They sent us a "new"
  driver via uucp (their nickel even) which has solved the immediate problem
  -- we don't drop the connections anymore.  New in this case was actually
  old, but stable (V2.1.7 .vs. V2.4.1).  This one gave us some fits due to a
  bad removal script which left line discipline change code in /etc/profile
  without warning, but once this was figured out the board worked.

o Throughput on input is still horrid.  This Anvil has promised to address,
  although I don't have any idea of when (no promised date).  They also took
  notes on a few other bugs I had discovered.  They agree that there
  shouldn't be a problem with doing what I'm attempting, and that they
  really hadn't run into anyone who needed high-speed input capability
  before (what, we're the first Usenet site that's bought one?!).

We're going to live with it for now as it does work and it does offload the
main CPU, and hope that Anvil Designs keeps their word on getting us some 
improved drivers.  What we have now is ok, but not worth the pricetag....
with improvements it has the potential to be well worth the "scratch".  I'll 
keep the net posted (especially if they really do fix things up nicely!)

--
Karl Denninger (karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM, ddsw1!karl)
Data: [+1 312 566-8912], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910]
Macro Computer Solutions, Inc.    	"Quality solutions at a fair price"