karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) (12/26/88)
Anyone out there have an idea on what's going on with this setup? We have just acquired an Anvil Designs 8-port I/O board. The firmware onboard is 1.0, diskette software 2.4.1 (so it says on boot). The problem we're seeing is that one (count it, one!) port receiving at 19200 is taking up to 90% of the board's CPU capacity! Two 19,200 connections and you start losing things. This is a per-direction total (which makes things even worse; a 19,200 SLIP connection would completely trash communications!) With a Telebit modem connected, and a 19200 terminal line, I can cause an incoming newsfeed on the modem to timeout and disconnect by doing a few ps's! One good thing about this board is that it came with a nice diagnostic that allows me to place the blame where it belongs. It gives you a board-CPU usage percentage on a real-time basis (updated once per second or so)..... No differences have been noticed when the monitor program was or was not running (which indicates that it's contribution to load is inconsequential). This board is rated for 8 ports @ 9600 baud in throughput. That means I should be able to run 4 19200 lines -- at 19200 -- and not lose anything! What's going on here? Oh yeah -- for comparison SCO's stock "dumb AT" drivers do better than this; we've been running a dumb Digiboard Com/8 at 38,400 for several months now and had NO problems! I expect more from a nearly-$1000 product when our last purchase of an 8-port (dumb) card for $300, and $50 worth of 16550 chips worked better than this board does! Ideas and suggestions (such as V2.4.1 drivers bite, get x.x.x) welcome! Get the ideas in quick if you have any; I just might drop-kick this thing through the wall before too long ;-) --- Karl Denninger (karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM, ddsw1!karl) Data: [+1 312 566-8912], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910] Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. "Quality solutions at a fair price"
karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) (12/29/88)
In article <2562@ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl@ddsw1.UUCP (Karl Denninger) writes: >We have just acquired an Anvil Designs 8-port I/O board. >The problem we're seeing is (rediculously low throughput on input....lost >characters).. > >One good thing about this board is that it came with a nice diagnostic that >allows me to place the blame where it belongs. > >This board is rated for 8 ports @ 9600 baud in throughput. That means I >should be able to run 4 19200 lines -- at 19200 -- and not lose anything! The following is an update on the status here: o Anvil was notified of the problem on Tuesday morning. They sent us a "new" driver via uucp (their nickel even) which has solved the immediate problem -- we don't drop the connections anymore. New in this case was actually old, but stable (V2.1.7 .vs. V2.4.1). This one gave us some fits due to a bad removal script which left line discipline change code in /etc/profile without warning, but once this was figured out the board worked. o Throughput on input is still horrid. This Anvil has promised to address, although I don't have any idea of when (no promised date). They also took notes on a few other bugs I had discovered. They agree that there shouldn't be a problem with doing what I'm attempting, and that they really hadn't run into anyone who needed high-speed input capability before (what, we're the first Usenet site that's bought one?!). We're going to live with it for now as it does work and it does offload the main CPU, and hope that Anvil Designs keeps their word on getting us some improved drivers. What we have now is ok, but not worth the pricetag.... with improvements it has the potential to be well worth the "scratch". I'll keep the net posted (especially if they really do fix things up nicely!) -- Karl Denninger (karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM, ddsw1!karl) Data: [+1 312 566-8912], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910] Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. "Quality solutions at a fair price"