jss@sjuvax.UUCP (Jonathan Shapiro) (11/30/84)
[Aren't you hungry...?] Is there any general concensus about the best way to handle IO to slow devices? I have been thinking about building a board whose disk interface has a sort of staging area of 4K or so and then tells the processor its there and come get it... This would allow, for example, hard disk backup which happened in bursts at memory to memory speed rather than memory to disk speed. My plan is to put a separate processor and bus on the disk interfac and connect these to the main bus through an IO port. Any thoughts/suggestions?
jc@sdcsvax.UUCP (John Cornelius) (12/01/84)
Xyplex makes a terminal subsystem for VAX that moves the character processing out onto a coax cable network. Boxes on the network perform all driver functions associated with characters. Data is transferred from the net to the VAX in records (usually one line) except when in cbreak mode. Drivers exist for VMS and UNIX. Records are transferred to the terminal in whatever size they are presented to the driver via DMA. The system has the additional feature that it allows up to 256 VAXen or terminal clusters to be connected on the same network. Terminals on any cluster can access any VAX if desired. Each cluster has an equivalent of L.sys and ttys so such things can be restricted of need be.