Status of serial ports

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According to this ...

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/faq.html#badserial

The serial ports on macppc are rather unstable.

I can't find the date on the FAQ, so I don't know how long
ago this 
assessment was made. Can we confirm if this is still the
case?

For what it's worth, I run 3.1.1_PATCH on a beige G3/333MHz
(OF 2.4).

What I'd like to do is hook up a null modem between the mac
and a Wintel 
box so I could run SSH sessions from the Wintel side.

>From what I can see here ...

http://lowendmac.c
om/ppc/g3b.shtml

It uses a DIN-8 GeoPort connector. The PC has a DB9 port.
I'm still trying 
to trace down a cable that could link the two boxes, but
does anybody have 
experience with a hook-up like this? Does it work?

TIA,

- -- 
Pierre Dubuc
pldubucyahoo.ca
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Hello,

On Oct 24, 2007, at 21:06, Pierre Dubuc wrote:

> According to this ...
>
> http://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/faq.html#badserial
>
> The serial ports on macppc are rather unstable.

That's hopefully fixed since 2.1 but for lack of feedback
that  
section hasn't been changed. Problem was that older versions
of  
NetBSD lost lots of interrupts on old world hardware which
made the  
serial ports pretty much unusable for anything more
demanding than a  
simple terminal session ( and everything else worked more or
less by  
accident only ). The interrupt code has seen major updates
since then  
and serial ports should be reliable now. I tested only up to
 
38400kBit/s because the machine on the other end wouldn't go
faster -  
not a single zmodem restart within hours, the machine was
happily  
processing a couple thousand interrupts per second.

> I can't find the date on the FAQ, so I don't know how
long ago this  
> assessment was made. Can we confirm if this is still
the case?

Well, give it a shot and tell us.

> It uses a DIN-8 GeoPort connector. The PC has a DB9
port. I'm still  
> trying to trace down a cable that could link the two
boxes, but  
> does anybody have experience with a hook-up like this?
Does it work?

I bought such an adaptor in a mac shop about 10 years ago.
Bottom  
line is you won't get hardware handshake but otherwise it
works fine.

have fun
Michael
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Since January of 2007, I have been running NetBSD 2.1 with
just a couple of
patches for my main web/ftp/shell/dial-up server.

The dial-up is via a Cyclades 8 port serial card and
external modems.

The improvements in interrupt handling code (and other
places) has
made a tremendous difference in NetBSD on my G3/G4
machine(s).
The ATA, memory management and serial performance have all
improved
markedly.

In particular, I no longer have to carry around the
non-trivial
hack I had for the Cyclades driver to make it work on
MacPPC.
It now works fine.

More importantly, both reliability and performance of the
ATA driver
is dramatically improved.  Very cool.

As I recall, I also ran this kernel on a couple of old-world
machines,
and tested the serial port(s) with ppp to the G4, and they
ran flawlessly.  (though ppp is still a bit of a pain
at times to configure)

So this is one positive report, such as it is.

-dgl-

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>
>According to this ...
>
>http://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/faq.html#badserial
>
>The serial ports on macppc are rather unstable.
>
>I can't find the date on the FAQ, so I don't know how
long ago this assessment was made. Can we confirm if this is
still the case?
>
>For what it's worth, I run 3.1.1_PATCH on a beige
G3/333MHz (OF 2.4).
>
>What I'd like to do is hook up a null modem between the
mac and a Wintel box so I could run SSH sessions from the
Wintel side.
>
>From what I can see here ...
>
>http://lowendmac.c
om/ppc/g3b.shtml
>
>It uses a DIN-8 GeoPort connector. The PC has a DB9
port. I'm still trying to trace down a cable that could link
the two boxes, but does anybody have experience with a
hook-up like this? Does it work?
>
>TIA,
>
>- -- Pierre Dubuc
>pldubucyahoo.ca
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>=5ufq
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