(386) Unix (In)compatibilities Summary

[Greg Woods]

Tricky things, those device drivers!

One note that especially caught my eye today was something about
Microport mucking with the internal interfaces of device drivers and the
kernel.  Microport's drivers won't link with the ISC kernel and
vice-versa, so it was implied.

Sounds like someone is trying to throw their weight around.  This is
just going to discourage people from supporting both systems.  Why I
sure wouldn't want to maintain drivers for two VERY similar but
definitely different systems!

I would say that in the case of the incommunicado Telebit that there is
a bug lurking in the driver.  Either that, or there was something
slightly askew between the two tests.  There are so many ways to
configure those modems, and different cable will make a big difference,
and different serial interface hardware will likely imply different
drivers too.

If one of the systems mentioned happens to be ISC's 386/ix, I'd be wary
of what appears to me to be a mis-understanding on their part about the
RS-232 interface.  We have an internal Hayes 2400 baud modem.  It seems
that the COM1/COM2 drivers in 386/ix won't allow uugetty to function
correctly.  Something tells me that if I could put a non-standard modem
cable (ie: one without all 25 pins wired straight through) between the
modem and the port, I could get it to work.  Of course this is slightly
impossible with an internal modem....

I'm not sure how they can get things so messed up when the termio man
page is so easy to read :-)  Now if only someone would copy Sun's
example, we could eradicate uugetty too... who needs it arguing with
verbose modems anyway!
-- 
						Greg Woods.

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