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From: michaelv@iastate.edu (Michael L. VanLoon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sys5.r3,comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,biz.sco.general,comp.unix.sys5.r4,comp.unix.unixware,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.periphs.scsi,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Subject: Re: Anyone using a BusLogic 747S with multiple disk drives ?
Date: 19 Jun 94 22:01:11 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
Lines: 69
Message-ID: <michaelv.772063271@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
References: <CrDswJ.7qE@cti-software.nl> <2tl4b0$3e0@rand.org> <2u132p$1t4@u.cc.utah.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ponderous.cc.iastate.edu
In <2u132p$1t4@u.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) writes:
>or buy only motherboards with known working chipsets (I'm partial
>to SiS for EISA, but that's just me -- and my very, very fast
>machine... Sis has the fastest Gate A20 I've ever seen, too).
Definitely. Demand a fix or your money back if you still have a
warranty. If your board was marketed as EISA but doesn't fully meet the
spec., I think you'd have a case to make some noise.
Like Terry, I love my ALR EISA board. It uses proprietary ALR EISA
chips with C&T support chips and Phoenix BIOS, plus a proprietary ALR
386 caching system. This is the fastest 386 I've ever used. All the
components used on the motherboard are of extremely high quality (like
Brooktree 25ns static RAM cache chips back when such things were
barely on the market).
I'll probably end up buying an ALR Evolution V Pentium system down the
road, in spite of the steep price, simply because my ALR EISA 386 has
simply been the most reliable, fast PC I could hope to own. When
everyone else was having problems with niggly little hardware
incompatibilities on various off-brand motherboards under
NetBSD-current, my machine continued to run flawlessly. And this was
when I was abusing the EISA chipset horrendously by running a fast
EISA bus-master SCSI controller on the same bus as a 16-bit ISA
sloooow AST RAMPAGE+ memory expansion board. Gawd it was slow back
then, but it never once hung or crashed from the abusive setup. (The
machine is very fast; the extra memory was on the bus so wasn't cached
-- it was what was slow.)
On the other hand, I was just able to have a fresh experience with
screwy PCI bus autoconfiguration. A company I do some Windoze NT
programming work for got me a DELL OmniPlex 566 (Pentium, 66MHz) to
use at the office. The machine came with built-in ATI Mach32 video on
the PCI bus, a built-in NCR SCSI chip on the PCI bus, plus a second
NCR SCSI board plugged into a PCI slot. No matter what I did I could
*NOT* get Windoze NT into 1024x768 mode -- it would refuse to go
higher than 800x600. Finally, I looked at the system log, and it said
that the video and the second SCSI controller were trying to access a
small region in memory at the same address. So much for that fancy
PCI auto-configure.
It's true that EISA requires you to boot up a configuration disk and
have all the configuration libraries for all the EISA devices you're
going to configure. But it lets *YOU* set all the attributes of each
EISA device. At least with EISA I would have been able to set the
addresses so they didn't conflict, to any value *I* wanted. PCI
wouldn't let me touch the settings of the SCSI controllers or the
video chip (except for the most rudimentary settings like on/off or
video refresh rates). There simply was no method available for me to
manually set the two devices not to conflict, and the PCI
hardware/firmware was too dumb to get them out of the way itself.
I finally yanked the second SCSI controller since I didn't need it.
From that point forward I could get the monitor into a beautifully
solid 1024x768 and even an interlaced 1200x1024.
Believe me, I do think PCI will eventually be *the* PC-architecture
bus to own. But this little experience just goes to show you that it
still isn't quite there yet.
--
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Michael L. VanLoon Iowa State University Computation Center
michaelv@iastate.edu Project Vincent Systems Staff
Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free Un*x for PC/Mac/Amiga/etc.
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