There was a kernel patch (or possibly a user-space tool) which allowed
one to change the "priority" of IRQs and their handlers. This was back
in the 1.2 or 2.0 days, when _any_ disk or other interrupt activity might
be enough to cause problems for serial connections (especially if you
only had a 16450 UART (1 byte buffer) instead of a 16550 (16 byte buffer).
You could make your serial interrupt (handler) take priority over disk
interrupts.
Maybe Ted Ts'o or other long-time Linux folks will know what was actually
called, and whether it is still applicable to modern hardware/kernel.
Cheers, Andreas
-- Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto, \ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?" http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/