Geert Bosch wrote in a message to Wim Veldhuis:

 GB> Wim Veldhuis wrote in a message to Florian Kirstein:

 WV> Also, when you do not have a 16550 with a FIFO, you probably
 WV> be better of letting the read task just put the stuff into a
 WV> buffer which is read by another thread. 

 GB> Oops! DOS-ism detected! You *shouldn't* take into account
 GB> which hardware you're using. OS/2 does the buffering, and
 GB> has a big enough buffer to prevent the UART from overflowing
It is my experiantation that it does matter, before I had an 16550 I 
would get transmission errors when switching tasks. This usually 
involved swapping which may have been the problem. OS/2 just wasn't 
fast enough on my machine to get all the characters :-(
But you are correct in that it shouldn't matter and I am not sure if
the overhead with reading just one byte at each read will place enough load
on the processor so it will sometimes miss a byte.

 GB> (if you really want to know how big, with the default
 GB> drivers it's something like 4 kB). Furthermore people don't
 GB> allways have 16450/16550's, but may use completely different
 GB> serial port hardware, maybe even using DMA or some other
 GB> technique.
In this case you won't need a seperate thread to put everything in a buffer I guess.
Thanks for the enlightment.

mvg/wr
  
--- timEd/2 1.01.g3+