lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (02/26/84)
That Canadian company (NCI) who is OEM'ing Coherent is a bit out of sync (actually, way out of sync) with the latest versions about to come out of MWC. Efforts are being made to get NCI more up-to-date base systems for them to use for their special applications stuff. They made some ad-hoc changes in the async line support, but it's all obsolete now and won't matter when the new version comes out of MWC. The bottleneck in the multiuser support for async lines was fixed at the same time I added all of the fancy modem control stuff that I needed for uucp. Incidently, I wanted to run three serial ports instead of the normal two, which made it even more important to get good, solid async line support. We did some investigating and found that the primary async problem was related to a resource allocation decision in the kernel. Anyway, we got it all fixed up so that uucp and similar stuff would work fine with multiple users logged in and C compiles going and such. Even more could be done if the #$@%#!@ PC hardware had a silo for the incoming async data -- as it is you are forced to grab each byte individually. What I'd give for an input silo with DMA access in that hardware... does anybody manufacture such a device for the PC? --Lauren--