Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:41:24 -0800 From: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org> To: "O. Hartmann" <ohartman@ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Parallelport Problems Message-ID: <199912182041.MAA00736@mass.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 14 Dec 1999 17:07:40 %2B0100." <Pine.BSF.4.10.9912141655180.4196-100000@ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Dear Sirs. > I administer several FreeBSD boxes (now FBSD 3.4-RC). One of them plays > the role of our printserver of our institute. This box is equippted with > AMD K6-2 500 MHz CPU, GigaByte GA-5AA main PCB with ALi 1542 100MHz Aladin-V > chipset, NIC is 3COM 3C905B 100Mbit fullduplex mode, memory 128 MB FSB100, > Adaptec 2940U controller and an additional parallel port card, made in china! > This additional parallelport card seems to be the troublesome unit on ISA bus > but the problem occurs with other multi i/o cards running the parallelport. > One of our printers is attached to this port an whenever a printjob is > queued and sent to the printer via parallelport, the server is unreachable > over the network. Ping latencies pushes up from 0.200 ms to 16 ms and higher. > Printing over the built in parallelport does not reveal this phenomenon. Parallel ports on PC hardware are extremely problematic. I can't recommend using more than one port per machine. You should consider either purchasing a couple of inexpensive USB to parallel adapter cables and using the USB printer support in FreeBSD, or look at obtaining network interface cards for your printers. > Both ports are using IRQs and DMA, port 1 has IRQ 7, dirq 1, port 2 has > IRQ 5, dirq 7. The additional card is capable of EPP 1.9 and I set the > flag for this in kernel config file. So far all things seems to be all > right. But why is the usage of any IO card, especially the parallel port > on additional cards blocking the PCI bus? The system is spending too much time spinning waiting for your printer to respond. See above inre. PC parallel port hardware. The only real "fix" for this is to not use the parallel port on your server for talking to your printers. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199912182041.MAA00736>