neg@ucrmath.UUCP (Neil Gretsky) (11/11/87)
Does anyone in net-land have recommendations on 8-port serial cards for use with Microport Unix/386. Why intelligent vs nion-intelligent? Thanks in advance. Neil Gretsky Univ. of California, Riverside ucrmath!neg
steve@wolf.UUCP (Steven Harrison) (11/14/87)
In article <60@ucrmath.UUCP>, neg@ucrmath.UUCP (Neil Gretsky) writes: > Does anyone in net-land have recommendations on 8-port serial cards > for use with Microport Unix/386. Why intelligent vs nion-intelligent? > Thanks in advance. > Neil Gretsky Neil, We use the intelligent card from Computone in Atlanta, GA. Their support has been wonderful even while they went through a reorganization! I have talked with Sharon many times and she always seems to have the answers on the tip of her tongue ready to answer before I am finished with the question! Intelligent cards can buffer the input from the ports before generating the interrupt. This is seen as an amazing increase in throughput on the machine in question. In a way it looks a lot like the Intel 310 with intelligent front end processors for serial I/O. Last and none to helpful part is that I don't know if they support Microport at all. We tried their version and I gave up on Microport. -- Steven Harrison Systems'n'Software San Diego, California UUCP: ihnp4!jack!wolf!steve ARPA: jack!wolf!steve@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu
mike@cimcor.UUCP (Michael Grenier) (11/15/87)
In article <554@wolf.UUCP>, steve@wolf.UUCP (Steven Harrison) writes: > In article <60@ucrmath.UUCP>, neg@ucrmath.UUCP (Neil Gretsky) writes: > > Does anyone in net-land have recommendations on 8-port serial cards > > for use with Microport Unix/386. Why intelligent vs nion-intelligent? > > Thanks in advance. > > Neil Gretsky > Neil, You can try the Inteligent Controller Card from Bell Technolgies (1-800-for-unix) which I've been using under uPort 286. It seems to work great for offloading the interrupt requests from the CPU. This card and the one from Digiboard have fast CPUs on board with enough memory to buffer the character streams at speeds up to one megabit per second. As I understand the driver, it actually polls the board every so often for information (still many times a second) and if info is available the card transfers the data via DMA. Even at 60 times a second, thats still only one interrupt every 16 milliseconds versus 125 Microseconds for 8 channels each receiving data at 9600 baud. The actual transfer then takes place as fast as the memory/bus allow. There is an excellent description of this approach (as well as decriptions of UNIX under the 286 and 386) in a new book, part of the Waite Group I believe, called the UNIX papers. Its in most book stores. -Mike Both boards should work under Microport 386. {ihnp4, amdahl, rutgers}!meccts!cimcor!mike