Hey all,

On  15 Apr, this message from Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler echoed through cyberspace:

At 5:41 AM -0500 4/15/02, Dan Bethe wrote:

quoted

quoted

I've not had too much trouble with my 9600/200mp. I haven't used it much
since early 2.4, mind you (got enough other unix boxes on my desktop), but

Not too much?  Does that mean you can beat the crap out of all subsystems 24/7
with no hardware failure?  :)  Like a 'make -j20' on the kernel src with
several concurrent 'badblocks'?

I think I could crash it by trying to use 'hdparm' on the IDE-connected
drives, but I don't recall anything else that would make it puke.

Yeah, hdparm -I crashed my 7600 with Promise too, at one time at least.
Didn't use it recently, though, since I know what's on the bus ;-)

Most of the fuss I ran into was just getting a kernel with the right
patches to talk to all the Promise card, and figuring out why the heck SMP
wouldn't work.

Both problems are resolved for 2.4 kernels.

quoted

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I haven't had much trouble with the PCI. I'm running a Promise Ultra66 and

Not much?  Does that mean it was reliable, or just sticky to configure?

Well, when I was linuxing my 9600, it was around the time of the PCI code
being in a state of a whole lot of flux, trying to handle 3+ busses per
machine and resorting board resources. I think (hope) that work has been
basically finnished and integrated now, so I wouldn't expect nearly as much
trouble now.

No, 2.4 kernels should have solid PCI even in the presence of multiple
host bridges (which was the problem on the dual-bandit 9x00). The only
potentially remaining problem could be access to IO space on the second
bus. Ben, can you comment?

Anyways, some things you might consider adding to a 9600 should you pick
one up:

#1: Ram. With 12 dimm slots, it can take a gig and a half of 5 volt 168-pin
FPM or EDO, though maxing it out might be expensive. Remember to install in
matched pairs to take advantage of interleaving.

To be sure, I have a tool on my homepage that checks the
hammerhead (memory controler) configuration for interleaving.

#2: Faster HD controller. QLogic cards are pretty sweet, Adaptec cards will
do in a pinch, and Promise cards seem to work nice if you've got a taste
for cheap IDE gigs. The PCI bus has a measured max throughput of 80MB/s per
bus, so you might as well put it to good use.

To take into account here: bootability. If you need a bootable
additional controler, than that limits your choices. Promise' are not
bootable; but there apparently is a MacOS version from some OEM that has
an OF ROM instead of the PC BIOS ROM. Don't know if it's
Linux-supported, though.

#3: Newer video. Radeon7000 PCI is a good choice. This obviously isn't a
factor when the system is to be used as a server though.

Yeah, according to all reports, the original IMS TwinTurbo cards are
problematic.

Chees

Michel

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