LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Daryl Tester <dt@picknowl.com.au>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 21:23:58 +1030

Re: Printtool

Mike Andrew wrote:

>> alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
>> options parport_pc io=0x378 irq=7

> I know you dont have a problem, by i would recommend you knock out the
> unnecessary options line. Or at the very least the irq statement.

You're probably right; at the time I needed the printer up and
running as quickly as possible, and I snarfed this result from
somewhere (most likely a newsgroup posting).  I'll try removing
it later when I have the luxury of playing with the settings.

> It's swallowing a scarce IRQ for something that is too slow to be
> useful and can in fact cause hiccups in the print drivers.

What makes the PC hardware different?  From my old device driver
days (different architecture), interrupt driving a "slow" peripheral
was much more resource efficient than polling the device, especially
on the CPU.  Or is it something peculiar to Linux?

Regards,
  Daryl Tester