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From: ngai@nova.bellcore.com (John Ngai)
Subject: VL-Bus and 386BSD compatibility
Message-ID: <1992Oct29.201909.4011@walter.bellcore.com>
Sender: ngai@nova (John Ngai 21371)
Nntp-Posting-Host: nova.bellcore.com
Organization: Bellcore
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 20:19:09 GMT
Lines: 53
As I have posted previously, I am seriously considering buying a good
performance PC to run UNIX at home. Right now I am inclined to get one
with the new VESA local bus mother board. A number of places sell them,
eg, Ariel, Gateways, Zeos to name a few. I favor VL-bus over EISA because
I will be using it primarily as a stand alone system at home, (not to mention
that EISAs are more expensive.) But I also want to have good video and disk
performance, which makes ISA somewhat undesirable. I would also like to run X
windows. In particular, I would very much like to run 386BSD and XFree86.
Being a complete novice to the PC world, I read some of the articles in this
and a few other newgroup, and I have a number of questions I hope someone can
help me with.
(1) Is it true that the Diamond cards, S3 or the WD based 24X are not supported
by XFree86. How about the new VL-bus ATI Graphics Ultra Pro? Has anyone used
or are trying to port code to support the Ultra Pro with XFree86? Just what
video boards are supported? A complete list would be most helpful here.
(2) To take advantage of the VL-bus, I am thinking of getting the UltraStor 34F
VL-bus SCSI adapter. Do we know if it is supported in 386BSD? Probably not
given it is so new, but my hope is that it is Adaptec compatible, since I
seem to recall someone posted saying that 386BSD supports Adaptec SCSI
controllers. Has anyone used it with 386BSD or is working on it? Besides
the Adaptec cards, what other SCSI cards are supported by 386BSD?
(3) Most of the systems I asked about, come with a direct-mapped write-through
cache. Is this undesirable for multitasking OS like UNIX? Just how serious
should I be concerned about this? Oh, I am thinking about a DX2-66 system
which means slow memory access will impose a even more severe premium on
overall performance.
(4) Also these systems almost all comes with the 16450 UART. Since I expect to
use a high speed modem to connect to other computers at work, is this
another deficiency I should be concerned about? Is the 16550 plug compatible
with the 16450 so that I can replace it. Just how difficult is it to
upgrade it to a 550?
(5) I would also very much like to be able to use both DOS/Windows along side
with UNIX, probably leaving DOS in an IDE drive that comes with the purchase
package. Can SCSI and IDE drives co-exist in 386BSD? How difficult is it to
set it up for a dual boot system, with C drive for DOS and a physically
separate D drive for 386BSD? Any utilities/freeware out there helping me
to do that?
(6) Perhaps the overall question I should ask is: Has anyone out there been
successful in bringing 386BSD and XFree86 to run on these (any) new VL-bus
systems? If so, would you mind if I email you more questions?
Sorry if these questions have been asked many times before, but I am just plain
ignorant and confused by all the PC idiosyncracies....
Thanks -- John