PS/2 Multi-port board

Chip Rosenthal chip at vector.Dallas.TX.US
Tue May 16 19:05:08 AEST 1989


In article <1903 at ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> gs940971 at longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu (glen sunada f84) writes:
>> Is there a multi-port serial board  (at least 4 ports)  for a PS/2 Model
>> 80 that works with SCO Xenix/386?
>The best multiport board for the PS/2 MCA
>machines I have herd of is the line of dumb and smart boards form DigiBoard

For the moment, I would be careful with the Digiboard.  I have an older
COM8/I here, and there are some serious bugs in the driver.  I don't know
if these bugs carry forward to the newer boards.  The bugs I have found are:

1)  If you set "brkint -ignbrk", you don't get a SIGINT on a BREAK, but
    rather a NUL character ('\000') is returned.

2)  There are cases where the port hangs.  At this point all attempts to
    close() to port get stuck, and you can't send anything out the port.
    I have confirmed that it is hanging at a sleep() in their diclose().

I reported these to Digiboard pretty recently, and in fairness they haven't
had time to respond yet.  I sincerely hope Digiboard resolves these
problems expediently.  I never had problems until my recent upgrade to
2.3 XENIX and their latest drivers.  Their support folks have been helpful,
and I *really* appreciate their update policy.  It is basically free.
You call up a BBS, and once authorized, you can download the latest
drivers.  They also provide detailed technical information on their board
which is a very refreshing change.  They also appear to handle RTS/CTS
correctly, which seems to be the exception, unfortunately.  So, I hope
they get it right.  I'll be pretty pissed if they don't, because I'll
have to throw out the board.

Also, if there is anybody out using a COM8/i under XENIX 2.3, I would be
very interested in whether you can confirm either of these problems or
not.
-- 
Chip Rosenthal / chip at vector.Dallas.TX.US / Dallas Semiconductor / 214-450-5337



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