harald@boink.UUCP (Harald Milne) (12/14/90)
While I'm here, I might as well let everybody know about this.
For a year now, my XENIX continiously crashed with panic TRAP D.
Also, any program would randomly drop core and die. So you can see, I
had a very flaky and unreliable system. I was begining to think XENIX was
just plain garbage.
2 months now, since replacing SIO with FAS, ALL these problems have
disappeared.
I'm using a dumb serial card with 2 16550's. Originally, I had 16450's.
I even turned on the FIFO's before eventually installing FAS. Nothing helped,
until I ripped out SIO, and put in FAS.
Conclusion: SIO is broken, and broken bad enough to crash your system.
Don't use SIO with dumb serial cards.
I've been running Bnews 2.11.19 via UUCP at 2400 baud for over a year,
and now finally, my system is working like it should. I spent MANY hours
trying to fix this problem (like writing a replacement driver).
SCO should be shot for this problem. Kernel panics are serious!
PS: I only changed a few ints to longs in FAS 2.07, for use on the 286.
PPS: I had to DROP the priority from 7 to 5 (same as the hard disk) to keep
serial activity from overwelming the hard disk!!! The highest hardware
priority is now the clock device. (As it should be on sane unix systems.)
--
Harald Milne RISCy business uunet!ccicpg!boink!haraldfields-doug@cs.yale.edu (Doug Fields) (12/15/90)
Perhaps the '286 SIO is broken, but the '386 one has worked flawlessly
for me for almost a year, running a (dumb) Digiboard/MC 8, pushing beyond
the SCO recommendation of 9600, to 38.4k and 19.2k. I would imagine that
like most things in the '386 version, the SIO is the same as the '286 or
even the '88. (Every notice doing a file on the bin directories returns
a bunch of 8088 and 80286 but few 80386's?)
Does anyone know how reliable the SCO Unix 3.2.2 SIO is at 19.2k? THanks
Doug
--
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Internet: fields-doug@cs.yale.edu <-- Best to reach me. Voice: +1 203 436-0184
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