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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!uwm.edu!lll-winken.llnl.gov!enews.sgi.com!decwrl!vixie!nnrp!vixie From: vixie@gw.home.vix.com (Paul A Vixie) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: HELP: installing netbsd+64mb RAM+adaptec Date: 14 Nov 94 10:10:11 Organization: Vixie Enterprises Lines: 26 Message-ID: <VIXIE.94Nov14101011@gw.home.vix.com> References: <39vogs$78p@dagny.galt.com> <MICHAELV.94Nov11143004@mindbender.headcandy.com> <3a1f98$pil@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <Cz9J3I.EyC@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: gw.home.vix.com In-reply-to: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk's message of Mon, 14 Nov 1994 15:02:05 GMT 99% or so of the 386/486 machines in the world have an ISA bus. 80% of these have no other bus. NetBSD _needs_ bounce buffers. FreeBSD and BSD/OS already have them. Nobody cares whether it is or isn't a hack. If we were going to shy away from obsolete designs, we wouldn't be using CPU's descended from sewing machines on computers designed to have 64KB of memory and cassette tape drives. What matters is whether somebody can grab the bits, dump 'em in, and get action. If NetBSD won't run on somebody's machine because they have more than 16MB of memory and only an ISA bus, they don't care whether or not bounce buffers are a hack, they'll just say "thank you for playing" and move on to Linux or whatever. Not a good way to prove your point. Now that we're in violent agreement, I suggest that you do what I did in the TNIC driver: grab a bunch of MCL's during initialization and use them as copy buffers if you ever get a live MCL during operation that is above the 16MB point. I see no performance problems since most MCL's are in fact from the <16MB point, this is just a corner case anyway. -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA <paul@vix.com> decwrl!vixie!paul