Very Computer

I'm trying to use a RS422 serial card based on the 16750 UART (made by
Brainboxes?), I'm trying to use it at 460Kbaud. I'm getting data but
occasionally I get repeated characters (I also get lost characters). The
application in question cannot tolerate loss or repetition and I can't
use flow control. I've tryed kernels 2.0.29, 2.1.30 ( which recognised
it as a 16750) and 2.1.99 which took the card to be a 16550A, but still
got losses and repetition. The repetition was of the form a char being
repeated from 16 bytes before (originally) and from 64 bytes before with
kernel 2.1.30.

Has anybody used a card at this speed, this UART at this speed, give me
any pointers.

Will a 200MHz Pentium be able to cope with this speed (no of interrupts)
with/without 64 byte FIFO???

Any help much appreciated.

Please mail me direct (too) as I am a stranger to this group.

Cheers

Nick
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Welcome to the world of real time programming!
You are generating interrupts much faster than the Linux kernel can handle.
Your choices are to either find some "real" time extension to the Linux
kernel, or get a driver (and probably kernel patch) that can minimize the
IRQ overhead of each byte.

If you can, start with the baud rate slow and make sure data is recived
correctly, to rule out progamattic bugs first.

step by step, increase the baud rate until it fails. It has been my
experience that an ISA card with a fairly responsive OS maxes out around
20K IRQ per second. Your 460K baud is about double that.

At your speed, you have a total IRQ response time of about 2us. I do not
know what the kernel overhead is, but 2us is not a lot of time. Plus, 2us
is a bit optimistic as well because your programs presumably need to so
something with this data.

You should target the IRQ handler (Including kernel overhead) to take no
more than .5us.

If your card is a ISA, you would be better off with an PCI

Good luck.

IIRC Linux sets the FIFO on a '550 to trigger at 8 chars. 2.0.x
doesn't recognise the '750 and if it thinks it's a '650 it will turn
the FIFO off (at which point you'd be correct and you'd get 46k
interrupts/sec) so the original poster does need to check how the
kernel handles the FIFO settings (remember he said that the UART was
recognised as a 750 by at least some of the 2.1 kernels - I don't have
source handy to check how it would handle the FIFO in that case).

However assuming one interrupt per 8 chars 460k would be roughly 5.75k
interupts per second which should be doable bearing in mind that the
serial driver was originally written to support 115k on a 486 using a
'450 (i.e unbuffered - 10k interrupts/sec).

However at those sort of speeds you need short leads and to pay
careful attention to flow control.

--
Paul

Quote:> Has anybody used a card at this speed, this UART at this speed, give me
> any pointers.

Quote:> Will a 200MHz Pentium be able to cope with this speed (no of interrupts)
> with/without 64 byte FIFO???

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Quote:>IIRC Linux sets the FIFO on a '550 to trigger at 8 chars. 2.0.x
>doesn't recognise the '750 and if it thinks it's a '650 it will turn
>the FIFO off

Also, ignore that '650 detection code that turns off the FIFOs in "serial.c".
That's only for buggy first-generation '650s, which newer versions don't
fall victim of. '650s (as will '750s) will be recognized as '550s, but still
take advantage of the larger Rx buffer.

        -Kenny

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Hi there

I used to run Linux 1.2.8 on 4 MB 16 MHz 386 SX. On this machine I just
could use my com ports at speeds > 57k6 while the 10 Mbps ethernet card
didn't couse any problems at all.

Now I run a 2.0.x kernel on a 20 MB 66 MHz 486 DX2
this machine will lose a few ppp packets while running X and Netscape.
I never lost an ethernet packet.

Since high speed serial ports are mainly used for ppp, it might be a good
idea to use a card that can recognise the start of a ppp packet, store it
completely on the card and only issue an interrupt after receiption.

Regards,
Rob

Hi there

Quote:> I run a hayes ESP (DMA, 1K bufers etc) unde 2.0.33 without any dropped
> chars. even without DMA, no dropped chars. I do have the speed set at 460k8
> to feed my ZyXEL E2864I ISDN stuff. at 921k6, I have been talking serially
> as well without problems.

Regards,
Rob

Quote:>> to feed my ZyXEL E2864I ISDN stuff. at 921k6, I have been talking serially
>> as well without problems.
> Any information on that card? An url perhaps?

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