Just as a data point I have been doing some work with a homebrew
audio device which generates 8000 interrupts per second and while it
does have a noticeable impact on my lowly i386 netbsd box (at 133MHZ)
it certainly doesn't crawl, performance is quite acceptable.
David Stanhope
dms@stanhope.org

----- Original Message -----
From: Aaron J. Grier <agrier@poofy.goof.com>
To: Lennart Augustsson <lennart@augustsson.net>
Cc: Richard Rauch <rkr@rkr.kcnet.com>; <port-i386@netbsd.org>
Sent: Friday, September 10, 1999 10:41 AM
Subject: Re: Heavy /dev/lpt use burdens system.


> On Fri, Sep 10, 1999 at 09:48:12AM +0200, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>
> > It seems that the printer driver causes an incredible number of
interrupts
> > per seconds, thousands of them.  Probably as many as your machine can
> > handle.  You should try the interruptless driver, but what is really
needed
> > is for someone to fix the ltp driver, perhaps to use DMA.
>
> that's funny, linux doesn't have this problem when using interrupt-
> driven printing, and it doesn't use DMA.
>
> <ducks>
>
> ----
>   Aaron J. Grier  | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." |
agrier@poofy.goof.com
>     "[...] of all the port lists to grumble to about slow CPU speeds and
>      other resource limitations, I'd imagine that port-vax is not a very
>      good choice :-)"  --  Brian D. Chase
>