Fw: serial H/W flow control -- a fairy tale?

[R. Luoma]

the fairy tale:

Once upon a time, two computers were communicating with each other
over their RS-232 serial ports.  During the data transfer, when
the receiving system's UART FIFO was getting full, it would use
the hardware RTS/CTS line to tell the other system to stop
sending data until the receiving system had a chance to empty
the FIFO.  The magical UART would handle in hardware all the messy
details.  No data would be lost and birds would bloom and the flowers chirp.

In reality, I am getting many over-run errors because the transmit systems
keeps merrily sending data whether the receiving system's UART FIFO is full or not;
furthermore, the after the FIFO fills, the RTS/CTS never change;
I have set the CRTSCTS flag, but there seems to be no hardware flow control at all.

Am I missing something?
Is serial flow control just an internet fairy tale?

Under linux, are there program to whether hardware flow control works?
If so, where can I find these programs?


-- 
R. Luoma

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