What does "zsN: silo overflow" mean?
The CPU serial ports - both ordinary serial ports A and B, and
the port for the keyboard and mouse - use the Zilog Z8530 SCC
chip. That chip has a 3-character on-board buffer called the
"silo". If a character arrives in the silo, the chip interrupts
the CPU at a high priority, and the interrupt service routine
reads the character out of the silo.
If the interrupt isn't serviced in time, more than 3 characters
can be placed in the silo by the chip; if so, the chip notes
that the silo "overflowed", and the interrupt service routine,
when called, will note that a "silo overflow" occurred.
If the machine is printing a message from the kernel, interrupts
from the chip will be held off; if the message takes long enough
to print, and characters are coming in quickly enough on the
serial port, more than 3 can arrive, and a "silo overflow" will
occur.
It is possible that a machine that's sufficiently busy in other
code that runs with interrupts held off could get a silo
overflow as well.
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