RLL and ESIX

[Mike Grenier]

>From article <1990Nov7.051419.19612 at karnak.cactus.org>, by john at karnak.cactus.org (John B. Meaders Jr.):
> In article <1990Nov6.002853.582 at medtron.medtronic.com> dt4100c at medtron.medtronic.com (Derek Terveer) writes:
>>
>>I have never been able to get rll controllers to work reliably with either rev c
>>or rev d of esix.
> 
> I have one running under Rev D (2 floppy, 2 disks Western Digital plain jane
> 16 bit type).  My AMI 386 BIOS does let me define my own drive type though
> so I can set it to ST-251 with 26 sectors instead of 17 sectors.
> -- 

Yes, but can you get it to work with the Fast File System?
I also have the Western Digital plain jane (WD1003-SR2) with my AMI
bios but ESIX consistantly panics in the routine echd_read_vtoc() when
booting the box after the tenth distribution floppy. My disk is somewhat
bigger than yours, .i.e 250 meg. The S51K file system works fine.

Of course, my Adaptec 2372 disk controller wasn't supported at all
with panics in the hdintr() routine. This forced me to buy the slower
WD card only to find out that the fast file system didn't work.
The WD1006-SR2 can also panic when accessing the raw drive : 
.i.e use 2 drives and do a mkpart -v on the second one while compiling
something big on the first. Using /etc/crash, it appeared that the 
user space wwas not locked in memory causing a page fault in hdintr().

But that's not so bad. The Furture Domain scsi card just gave me 
errors something like "HA 1 has no TAs" when connecting to the 
Wren Drive under ESIX...more money down the drain

The Adaptec driver does bad things when using multiple SCSI drives. In 
particular, if a bad block occurs on the second drive, ESIX will attempt
to reread the block on the first drive...this can be really bad.
(We ended up using a SCSI analyzer to track that one down :-)

The Scsi Device Interface (SDI) also doesn't seem to work correctly
with examples taken right out fo the AT&T manual failing the
SDI_SEND ioctl.

This only describes the problems I've had with the hard disk drivers.
As you can tell, I wouldn't recommend ESIX to my cat let alone a UNIX
user. So far, I've swapped in my printer driver and the FAS serial driver
and am using the ST01 scsi controller for the Wren drives. 

One thing I can say for Microport, my old UNIX System V/386 Release 3.0e
was rock solid on the same hardware. 
You can guess which vendor will be supplying our UNIX V.4

    -Mike Grenier
    mike at cimcor.mn.org
    mike at sp.unisys.com