Re: [hylafax-users] New way of using Eicom diva boards for fax reception

["Andrew Rinaldi" <andrew.rinaldi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Luke,

I'll post again later regarding your apparent lack of knowledge about the
Eicon boards and their proprietary API.  However, a couple of points in
particular requires some education;

>It may be good SALES point for mainpine but it prevents your boards
>scaling up to run more than 16 ports because each port takes an
>interrupt. You are limited by the number of interrupts your bus
>supports, or on modern PCs how many interrupts you can have per APIC
>(24 - some already used by the system). PowerMacs will do better than
>PCs here.

Every evening our boards are soak tested in PC racks that support 16 PCI
boards.  During OCTO+ testing we have 128 ports all sending and receiving
fax's at the same time.  These machines are quite old running 1.2GHz PIII's
with 512MB's of RAM.

We also have numerous fax broadcast customers who deploy 64 port systems (8
x OCTO+ boards) on a regular basis.

>You could use interrupt sharing ... but that's not recommended. That's
>why people by intelligent serial boards with one CPU that assists in
>IO or devices with with a central CPU to assist with flow control and
>interrupt handling. I know you guys have recently released a new model
>of your card that uses PCI express. Maybe you could explain to the
>list how the "sideband api" overcomes this drawback found in earlier
>mainpine models in a different thread.

As explained above interrupt sharing is not an issue and has never been
during the last ten years that we have sold multiport modems based on the
16550 architecture.  However, our SideBand architecture does allow interrupt
status of all ports to be retrieved using a single register.  This is a
'standard' feature of 'old' multiport serial cards and is supported by
default in the Windows OS and older versions of the Linux Kernel (as I said
in another post the latest Linux serial drivers have removed support for
many important features including the interrupt status registers).

SideBand is supported on the Mainpine RockForce, RockForce 2000, RockForce
IQ, and IQ Express products.  It has many enhanced features including
hardware revisions, board serial numbers, interrupt optimisation, data
stream processing (compression, echo cancellation, etc), security, and port
resets amongst others.  The port reset feature allows the fax application to
reset a port should it become 'wedged' or if the application wishes to
return the port to a known state.  We have deployed this architecture to
many of our high volume customers during the last 10 years.  If you doubt
how useful this feature is just do a search of the archives for 'wedged'.

Regards 

ANDREW RINALDI
Mainpine Limited - Support
USA +1 503 822 9944 | Asia/Europe +44 1225 869439  
andrew.rinaldi@xxxxxxxxxxxx | www.mainpine.com



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