Consensys PowerPorts cards (Was Re: '386 Unix Wars)

[Colonel Panic]

In article <2774CA86.2C49 at telly.on.ca> evan at telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>Both the Corollory 8x4 boards and the Consensys Powerports require you
>to set a separate memory address for each board (you shouldn't need too
>many boards, though, as they can be configured to hold 32 and 48 ports
>per board, respectively).
>On both cards, the address is settable to EITHER somewhere above 12Meg
>or somewhere between 640K and 1Meg. One has to be a bit careful about a
>setting in the latter range because it can conflict with auxilliary BIOS
>locations (often found on video or disk boards). But it is preferable,
>and necessary if you want to install >12Meg of RAM.
>Both cards require you to set a port, and the Corollory needs an
>interrupt too.
>Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario

I don't know if it impacts users who use addresses > 12 MB, but there
is a general problem with the PowerPorts drivers that has just been
discovered.

I recently replaced a PowerPorts/16 combo with a PowerPorts/HD with 32
ports.  The ports card works fine, but I get lots of complaints on the
console from a network driver (WIN/TCP for 386 STREAMS).  I called
Consensys when I first encountered this, at which point they hadn't
heard of any problems from anybody else. 

I checked with them again today, and it turns out that, yes, they have
discovered a driver bug that burps on interrupts and can nail incoming
packets.  Their verified case was with StarLAN, but the behavior sounds
similar to what I'm seeing.  They supposedly have it coded, and I
should get a fix in some form by the end of the week (I HOPE).
(Meanwhile, I've been living with keeping the network rc script
disabled.)

Meanwhile, if anybody is encountering apparent network problems on a 
system with a PowerPorts, be forewarned.  They claim it can happen on
either card type, though it is much more pronounced on the HD card.

I'll followup with more info as I get it.  Followups to comp.unix.sysv386.

--
Alan Denney  #  aland at informix.com  #  {pyramid|uunet}!infmx!aland
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                                "Boy's Gone Crazy", Was (Not Was)