dal@syntel.mn.org (Dale Schumacher) (11/21/89)
> I have a request for whoever may be working on rs232 driver upgrades. > > *** PLEASE IMPLEMENT BREAK GENERATION *** > > Break detection would be nice, but I *NEED* break generation. I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about my recent work in this area. The 1.4b (aka 1.5.0) Minix-PC seems like it will be available shortly, and will include (as I understand) Bruce Evans' TTY driver. I run Minix-ST, and the tty driver is machine specific, so this doesn't immediately help me. Some time ago I started looking at why the tty was so slow and messy (the old Minix-ST tty drivers) and started working on a new POSIX compliant (_must_ have BREAK) TTY driver for Minix-ST. In the process, I discovered that the clock driver was eating up a lot of system resources doing very little work. That, and the fact that I needed more timers (one for each _minor_ device number for tty), prompted a redesign of that section as well. These changes are not going to make it into the "official" 1.4b Minix-ST, unfortunately, but should be available in a week or two for those who want to use them. > Most systems I use require me to generate a BREAK as part of the > logon sequence. Because of this, I've not been able to get the > Peter Housel UUPC working. (I have packet transfer failures with > the one system I can log onto without a BREAK - a Sys-V system with > HoneyDanBer UUCP). Why am I working on TTY? Because I need a reliable TTY to get all the uucp software up and running. I quit developing the mail/news software under Minix-ST because I couldn't test it without a better tty, and I don't have that done yet, so I moved over to TOS (and MS-DOS clone) and have been developing there with an eye toward portability back to *NIX machines. I've been working from Peter Housel's uucico (thank you Peter!) and finding (and fixing) a few bugs there :-(. Peter may choose to post an update to the Minix-PC version of his code to fix some of the problems I found. In any case, I've gotten the uucico working (7-window works great) and have been moving outward to other parts of the mail/news system. I've picked up a copy of the SMAIL 2.5 sources and after some fairly extensive modifications (backward compatible) I've ported it to TOS as the primary mailer-agent. It's a VERY nice piece of software and it amazingly small. Here is a small diagram of the software involved in handling mail: [mail] -----> [smail] -----> [uux] -->|spool directory|--> [uucico] -- ^ | ^ | | | | remote system | V | | |mailbox| <-- [lmail] <--- [rmail] <--|spool directory|<-- [uucico] -- Other developers locally are working on getting the news software to run on top of this support, so we will hopefully make full mail/news software available in the next few months! \\ / Dale Schumacher 399 Beacon Ave. \\ / (alias: Dalnefre') St. Paul, MN 55104-3527 >< ...umn-cs!midgard.mn.org!syntel!dal United States of America / \\ "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, / \\ which is the exact opposite." -Bertrand Russell