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Date:      Sun, 29 Jun 1997 10:42:01 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Simon Shapiro <Shimon@i-Connect.Net>
To:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, bmcgover@cisco.com
Subject:   Re: Clists limited to 1024 bytes?
Message-ID:  <XFMail.970629104201.Shimon@i-Connect.Net>
In-Reply-To: <199706291005.UAA29898@godzilla.zeta.org.au>

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Hi Bruce Evans;  On 29-Jun-97 you wrote: 
> >> Anyway, 19200 bps is not a heavy load unless there are a lot of active
> >> ports.  With 32 active 16550 ports it would be fairly heavy, but still
> >> gives less than 6% of the throughput of a single 10Mb/s ethernet.
> >
> >I was thinking more (on a 16550) about what happens at 115,200, 230,400,
> >and more.  These are speeds we see already today with ISDN lines.
> >The option of an external TA (such as a Motorola BitSRFR) is very
> apealing,
> >but behavior at these speeds needs careful consideration.
> >
> >How would you adjust the drivers to acomodate these speeds?
> 
> 115200 was fast 10 years ago, but 230400 is currently not well support
> (if you change the hardware clock to get it, then then the buffer sizes
> are too small).  How many ports do you need?

Actually, about 15 years ago we used 384Kbps on terminals hooked to a Unix
box (the tahoe was capable of supporting 256 of these, if i remember
correctly), so even 10 years ago... :-)

Yes, we use a doubled hardware clock.

2 ports is well enough.

> >We experienced a lot of complex problems with SCSI transactions until we
> >bumped the sio interrupt bufferto double its size.  While performance
> (on 
> >the sio ports - we use them only for PPP) did not drop visibly, the
> strange
> >incidence of dropping biodone() calls virtually stopped.
> 
> This probably just made a race less common.

It would be interesting to actually solve this mystery;  how does a buffer
overflow in the sio (under PPP) cause biodone to lose a completion.
We know, with very high degree of certainty, that we do not lose
interrupts, nor miss a call to scsi_done (which calls biodone, somehow).
It appears that from scsi_done() up things drop in this case.  Not every
time.  Nasty...

Simon



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