Need information on VP/IX or DosMerge ability to access odd hardware

Peter da Silva peter at ficc.uu.net
Tue Mar 27 23:26:37 AEST 1990


I don't know about VP/ix, but programs that need direct access to the
serial port work under Merge/386. But there's a problem: System V/386 is
not a real-time operating system, and communicating with a high-speed
serial port is a real-time task. We used this combination in one system,
and the number of dropped characters at 9600 baud was unacceptable. You
can get away with taking over the interrupts under DOS because DOS doesn't
have enough of an O/S to get in the way, but under UNIX the only way to
do this is to write a UNIX device driver... which is the only sort of real
time task a conventional UNIX system supports.
-- 
 _--_|\  `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter at ficc.uu.net>.
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