*BSD News Article 66981


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
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From: bfriedma@cs.ohiou.edu (Boris A. Friedman)
Subject: help needed: serial port overflows under NetBSD 1.1
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X-Nntp-Posting-Date: Wed Apr 24 21:19:54 1996
Organization: Ohio University Mathematics Department
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 01:19:53 GMT

Folks, I need some help from NetBSD experts. I am running NetBSD 1.1
on Gateway 2000 80486DX/33 (and I do enjoy running it too - great
operating system!). Right now I am running some tests using compressed
SLIP. I am using a port of "dip" software to NetBSD. In the dip script
I set my serial port speed to 57600 which should well exceed the
modem's 31200 bps. The problems start when I download something from a
10mbps network. NetBSD com driver starts reporting a lot of
overflows. I am getting messages of the following flavor:
"Apr 23 22:19:00 zhivago /netbsd: com1: 13 silo overflows, 0 ibuf
overflows".

The reason I'm worried is because I want to have some clean tests, and
so I'd like to make sure that I'm losing stuff not because of a faulty
operating system. It seems strange that the serial line overflows,
given that our terminal server runs at only 38200. To this effect I
have three questions: 

1) Is there a way in NetBSD to probe the serial port and find its
actual baud rate (I think my com port is smth. like NS8250).

2) Is it known that NetBSD doesn't handle serial connections very
well? The thing is that I never had this problem when I ran Linux (I
had a lot of others though:-), but I suspect that Linux might have
just silently discarded stuff, while NetBSD is more honest.

3) A similar problem occurs with my network card. I have an 8-bit
3c503 card, and NetBSD reports that the buffer is being overrun during
every large file transfer. Never had this with Linux. Any comments on
that?

Thanks very much.
Boris.