Ethernet boards for ISC 386/ix

[John Richardson]

In article <201 at scooter.PLSN.CA.US>, carlson at scooter.PLSN.CA.US (Joe Carlson) writes:
> In article <1423 at hydra.gatech.EDU>, gb7 at prism.gatech.EDU (Joe Bradley) writes:
> > 
> > I just bought a Western Digital EtherCard Plus (WD 8003e) to use with
> > ISC 386/ix.  Unfortunately, the WD manual says it only works in machines
> > with clock rates of 16 MHz or less.  I have a Dell 310 running at 20
> > MHz.  I thought I would give it a try anyway.  Not surpisingly, it
> > doesn't work.  ........
> 
> 	Hmmm... I cannot find any such limitation mentioned in the WD8003E
> docs that I have (I have heard they will not work in machines that run the
> AT bus at .gt. 8Mhz).  I also have 2 Dell 310's running SCO XENIX and various
> TCP/IP packages all with WD8003E cards... all working just fine.

  I use a WD8003-EBT (32K) board in a 33 Mhz motherboard with out any
problems. I am running a version of our real time UNIX and have taken care
to insert delays between access to the control registers on the NIC chip
to give it time to recover.
  Another issue is that some motherboards will not pay attention to the
WAIT line, and if this is the case, an access while the NIC chip is DMA'ing
to local on board memory will not be held off properly.

					JR