CZ(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual CZ(4)
NAME
cz -- Cyclades-Z series multi-port serial adapter device driver
SYNOPSIS
cz* at pci? dev ? function ?
DESCRIPTION
The cz device driver supports the Cyclades-Z series of multi-port serial adapters. The Cyclades-Z is an intelligent serial controller com-
prising:
o PLX9060ES PCI bus interface
o Xilinx XC5204 FPGA
o IDT R3052 MIPS CPU
The MIPS CPU runs firmware provided by the device driver. Communication with the MIPS is performed by modifying data structures located in
board local RAM or host RAM.
The Cyclades-Z comes in three basic flavors:
o Cyclades-8Zo rev. 1 -- This is an older 8-port board with no FPGA. The serial ports are provided by an octopus cable.
o Cyclades-8Zo rev. 2 -- This is the newer 8-port board. The serial ports are provided by an octopus cable.
o Cyclades-Ze -- This is the expandable version of the Cyclades-Z. It uses an HD-50 SCSI cable to connect the board to a 1U rack
mountable serial expansion box. Each box has 16 RJ45 serial ports, and up to 4 boxes may be chained together, for a total of 64
ports. Boxes 3 and 4 require their own external power supply, otherwise the firmware will refuse to start (as it cannot communi-
cate with the UARTs in those boxes).
The Cyclades-Z has several features to improve performance under high serial I/O load:
o The board may operate in interrupt-driven mode or polled mode to reduce interrupt load.
o Each channel has a large input and output buffer.
o Each channel may be programmed to generate an interrupt based on reception of a specific character, e.g. a PPP End-Of-Frame charac-
ter.
o The MIPS CPU on the board performs all flow-control handling.
FILES
/dev/ttyCZnnnn -- dial-in (normal) TTY device
/dev/dtyCZnnnn -- dial-out TTY device
SEE ALSO
pci(4), termios(4), tty(4)
HISTORY
The cz driver first appeared in NetBSD 1.5.
AUTHORS
The cz driver was written by Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com> and
Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@zembu.com> of Zembu Labs, Inc.
BUGS
The cz driver does not currently implement communication via host RAM. While this may improve performance by reducing the number of PCI mem-
ory space read/write cycles, it is not straightforward to implement with the current bus_dma(9) API.
Interrupt mode has not been tested.
There is no support for reading or writing the EEPROM connected to the PLX PCI bus controller.
BSD
May 17, 2000 BSD
Check Out this Related Man Page
CYTUNE(8) System Administration CYTUNE(8)
NAME
cytune - tune driver parameters for Cyclades-Z multiport serial card
SYNOPSIS
cytune [-q [-i interval]] [{-s|-S} value] [-g|-G] [{-t|-T} timeout] tty...
DESCRIPTION
cytune queries and modifies the interruption threshold for the Cyclades driver. Each serial line on a Cyclades card has a 12-byte FIFO for
input (and another 12-byte FIFO for output). The "threshold" specifies how many input characters must be present in the FIFO before an
interruption is raised. When a Cyclades tty is opened, this threshold is set to a default value based on baud rate:
Baud Threshold
50-4800 10
9600 8
19200 4
38400 2
57600-150000 1
If the threshold is set too low, the large number of interruptions can load the machine and decrease overall system throughput. If the
threshold is set too high, the FIFO buffer can overflow, and characters will be lost. Slower machines, however, may not be able to deal
with the interrupt load, and will require that the threshold be adjusted upwards.
If the cyclades driver was compiled with ENABLE_MONITORING defined, the cytune command can be used with the -q option to report interrupts
over the monitoring interval and characters transferred over the monitoring interval. It will also report the state of the FIFO. The max-
imum number of characters in the FIFO when an interrupt occurred, the instantaneous count of characters in the FIFO, and how many charac-
ters are now in the FIFO are reported. This output might look like this:
/dev/cubC0: 830 ints, 9130 chars; fifo: 11 threshold, 11 max, 11 now
166.259866 interrupts/second, 1828.858521 characters/second
This output indicates that for this monitoring period, the interrupts were always being handled within one character time, because max
never rose above threshold. This is good, and you can probably run this way, provided that a large number of samples come out this way.
You will lose characters if you overrun the FIFO, as the Cyclades hardware does not seem to support the RTS RS-232 signal line for hardware
flow control from the DCE to the DTE.
In query mode cytune will produce a summary report when ended with a SIGINT or when the threshold or timeout is changed.
There may be a responsiveness vs. throughput tradeoff. The Cyclades card, at the higher speeds, is capable of putting a very high inter-
rupt load on the system. This will reduce the amount of CPU time available for other tasks on your system. However, the time it takes to
respond to a single character may be increased if you increase the threshold. This might be noticed by monitoring ping(8) times on a SLIP
link controlled by a Cyclades card. If your SLIP link is generally used for interactive work such as telnet(1), you may want to leave the
threshold low, so that characters are responded to as quickly as possible. If your SLIP link is generally used for file transfer, WWW, and
the like, setting the FIFO to a high value is likely to reduce the load on your system while not significantly affecting throughput.
Alternatively, see the -t or -T options to adjust the time that the cyclades waits before flushing its buffer. Units are 5ms.
If you are running a mouse on a Cyclades port, it is likely that you would want to maintain the threshold and timeout at a low value.
OPTIONS
-s value
Set the current threshold to value characters. Note that if the tty is not being held open by another process, the threshold will
be reset on the next open. Only values between 1 and 12, inclusive, are permitted.
-t value
Set the current flush timeout to value units. Note that if the tty is not being held open by another process, the threshold will be
reset on the next open. Only values between 0 and 255, inclusive, are permitted. Setting value to zero forces the default, cur-
rently 0x20 (160ms), but soon to be 0x02 (10ms). Units are 5 ms.
-g Get the current threshold and timeout.
-S value
Set the default threshold to value characters. When the tty is next opened, this value will be used instead of the default. Only
values between 1 and 12, inclusive, are permitted.
-T value
Set the default flush timeout to value units. When the tty is next opened, this value will be used instead of the default. If
value is zero, then the the value will default to 0x20 (160ms), soon to be 0x02 (10ms).
-G Get the default threshold and flush timeout values.
-q Gather statistics about the tty. The results are only valid if the Cyclades driver has been compiled with ENABLE_MONITORING
defined. This is probably not the default.
-i interval
Statistics will be gathered every interval seconds.
BUGS
If you run two copies of cytune at the same time to report statistics about the same port, the 'ints', 'chars', and 'max' value will be
reset and not reported correctly. cytune should prevent this, but does not.
FILES
/dev/ttyC[0-8]
/dev/cubC[0-8]
SEE ALSO
setserial(8)
AVAILABILITY
The cytune command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
util-linux March 1995 CYTUNE(8)