Wangtek Tape streamers and Intel bug.

[clewis at ecicrl.UUCP]

Some news from our system supplier (they're reasonably reputable - they're
larger than Compaq...) regarding two problems that I haven't
seen discussed here before:

	- Wangtek 60Mb streamers (the 1/2 height, PC-controller types - 
	  I believe that they're called PC36 kits) have a "problem"
	  with UNIX of *all* types.  Several systems we've seen have
	  had random system crashes of various types when any significant
	  system activity is occuring at the same time as large tape
	  jobs.  Eg: cpio's with 100k buffers.  Apparently Wangtek is
	  shipping 150Mb units in place of 60Mb units at no additional
	  charge until there is a fix....  I have no further info, nor
	  direct response from Wangtek yet - though I'm trying.
	- Intel 386 rev "D" chips have a "bug" that causes them to
	  crash systems when FPU activity occurs at the same time as
	  DMA (this is presumably a coprocessor timing problem), which
	  we've seen (I think) occasionally with awk jobs doing a lot
	  of disk activity and operations with large numbers (SIGFPE
	  in this case).

	  Fixes available: apparently there's some sort of socket that
	  can be used to "solve" the problem with rev D and earlier
	  386's.  Intel is apparently shipping 386 chips with this problem
	  fixed now.

Will post further info when I get it.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Markham, Ontario, Canada
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