*BSD News Article 79286


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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FBSD and EISA machines
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 18:24:33 +0000
Organization: Erol's Internet Services
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Message-ID: <324ACA61.1A8B@www.play-hookey.com>
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Margaret Tarbet wrote:
> 
> I think that not-so-long-ago i started to read a discussion, or
> maybe it was only a contention, that FBSD doesn't really take
> advantage of EISA address space; that anything over 16Mb
> is just as useless as under DOS.  I wish i could go back and
> finish reading it, but it seems to be gone from the list and it
> is certainly gone from my (now-defunct) winnie.
> 
> Can anyone (maybe from the hacker group) refresh my head
> about this?  It sounds fishy on the face of it, but if there's
> anything to it, it'd be good to know since i favor Gang-of-Nine
> machines.
> 

I don't believe it. I am not up on the precise differences between EISA
and ISA/VLB and ISA/PCI, etc. However, I'm running my site on an ISA/VLB
motherboard with 36 MB RAM at this point, running a 486DX-50. I have
other machines in my subnet running anywhere from 20MB to 36 MB, also on
ISA/VLB motherboards.

There is only one thing I've had to do: activate "bounce-buffers" for
DMA, since most motherboard configurations won't allow DMA above 16 MB.
All else runs fine this way.

(Also note that the FreeBSD main site runs 512 MB. I very much doubt
that only 16 MB is actually working!
-- 
Ken

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