Subj : Sio vs Sio2k
To : Mike Luther
From : Torsten Bamberg
Date : Sat Apr 16 2005 02:00 am
Hello Mike!
on Friday, 15. April 2005 14:21, Mike Luther wrote to me:
ML> I think I see what you are saying.
Well, sorry for my english. My german is much better. ;-)
ML> That by specifying that the IRQ is
ML> hard coded in the setup line for IRQ3 and IRQ4 like that, you suggest that
ML> is where the conflict arises? As I understood his post, he had only ONE
ML> actual hard cable connected modem in this setup. That was the COM1
ML> device. It normally is on IRQ4 and has to be known as that way to SIO or
ML> SIO2K per what I think I understand.
Me either.
ML> I, in fact, use a four port hard coded serial board on this BBS box here.
ML> While it is an ISA-type card, and it has the ability to define and set up
ML> each COMM port with a different IRQ specified and that is the way I used
ML> it, it also *CAN*, share the same IRQ for all the ports, even in an ISA
ML> slot. That because of special design and driver work. However, I don't do
ML> that common IRQ driver operation. I use separate IRQ's for each port. As
ML> has been posted for a long time, OS/2 can share the same IRQ for different
ML> driver purposes. However that is dependent on the fact that the drivers
ML> which do this stunt have all been coded very carefully to allow this. You
ML> saw this heavily on the old COMPAQ computer systems which were shipped
ML> with OS/2 long ago and also were shipped with custome made Adaptec SCSI
ML> controller cards, as well as hard disk drives that were carefully
ML> specified to be compatible with these common single IRQ use techniques.
Well, I've tried to use all 4 buildin Com-Ports with modems, and on some
mainboards it does work, on others not. Sometimes there are strange timing
errors, sometimes I couldn't reach com3 and com4. Aehm, I usually have european
Boards, witch are produced in china or taiwan (gigabyte, msi, intel)
ML> I never caught that conflict IRQ use in his post. But SIO and SIO2K both
ML> don't normally care about merged IRQ assignments for multiple internet
ML> ports, as I understand this. Thus, here are the two different CONFIG.SYS
ML> lines for my system here with four hardware ports and the additional
ML> internet ports that work just fine here:
ML> I don't use a PS/2 style mouse. It is a serial port mouse that is fed to
ML> my beloved ROSE rack mount KVM switch operation. Thus in this case the
ML> IRQ12 is available for that COM4 use above which otherwise would be in
ML> conflict with the PS/2 type mouse.
ML> Notice the two internet ports configured in that COM5 and COM6 SIO
ML> operation above that use different ports but the same IRQ? As far as I
ML> know the software simulated ports in SIO and SIO2K can handle the internet
ML> port creation stuff just fine with a common IRQ specified. But I don't
ML> assign that to an IRQ which is used elsewhere in hard coded ISA or
ML> hardware board level COMM port work. And I do not use any of the normal
ML> communications ports for an internet port with SIO either,
Ok, I see. As I understood, he has theese specific problems on com1, 3f8, irq4.
He mapped the virtual comports to com2/com3/com4.
ok.
Well, my expirence is, that sometimes the timing-options of the builtin fifo
chips are very worse, or/and speed down the hole system. I found out, that
especially via-chipsets having a very worse timing on comports.
Just, after I disabled all buildin comports, and using a multi-comport-card,
these problems have been gone.
