SMD disk drives under Microport/Xenix.

[Roddy Manzie]

Over here, I am running Microport with a 515 Megabyte CDC drive (SMD interface)
but there are a few problems. I use 1.3.8 Microport (old....) on 286, and the
bugs seem to be:

fsck: performing fsck on a raw partition of over 40/50 megabytes causes it
      to dump core.

mkfs: using mkfs to create file systems on disks with large numbers of sectors
      per cylinder, it isn't possible to set this value correctly for the file
      system (it seems to wrap around at 128 spc).

swap/root:
      setting the swap/root partitions to be the SMD can cause panics under very
      heavy loads. This is what I would expect, though, as the disc goes far
      faster than anything Uport will have tested their system against, and
      there are almost certainly latent, time-dependant bugs in the kernel.

However, there seems to be no problem running very heavy loads with the SMD as a
mounted file system. It seems to be pretty fast too...

The board is available from Interphase, it is called the 'Maverick', but I am
unsure of the price. The UK  ( and US? ) supplier is:

		Gary Green,
		'Trudos', Heath Ride,
		Finchhampstead, Wokingham,
		Berks, RG11 3QJ.
		Tel (UK) 0737 733414

I believe that the driver for UNIX is charged for (but you get the source),
but they do a DOS driver for nothing. A Xenix driver for the board is in the
pipeline, but I don't know when it will be available.

Roderick Manzie,

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