More QEMM/STEALTH/XSTI

[clark@tomcat.gsfc.nasa.gov (Tom Clark -- W3IWI)]

On a lark, based on yesterday's XSTI triumph and some comments in the
DESQVIEW.NOT file in the Clarkson drivers package, I tried an intersting
DesqView experiment. In the past most of us had found that the packet
driver had to be loaded inside the DV window, not in the "core" MessDOS
area.

Since XSTI blocks QEMM & DV from diddling with an interrupt, used XSTI
to ignore both XSTI=0D (corresponding to the IRQ5 hardware interrupt I
use on the 3C503) and XSTI=60 (corresponding to the packet driver interrupt
I use). Lo and behold, I was able to use LOADHI to load the 3C503 driver
and have it run (sorta) from within DV without crashing immediately.

I say "sorta" since, while I found that NOS ran fine in this environment,
other programs (Wordstar, Quattro and even DOS itself) would occasionally
(like 10-20% of the time) lock up the machine when they were run. But it
did not crash immediately which had been the past experience.

Because the system did crash occasionally, I have reverted to the config-
uration I reported on last nite. But it looks like there is hope!

To see if having the Ethernet driver loaded into the DV window vs. loaded
into high memory vs. running NOS in "nude" MessDOS affected performance,
I tested the 3 schemes doing FTPs to a local Unix box. In all 3 cases,
I achieved 90-95kbyte/sec PUT and 30-33kbyte/sec GET performance, and
saw less than 10% difference between the 3.

Tom