[comp.sys.m68k] Ironics p32

rg@unh.UUCP (Roger Gonzalez) (08/08/89)

Has anyone had experience dealing with Ironics?  We have an Ironics
Performer (ha!) 32 running SysV, and it just loooves to crash.  It
spits out trap 165's seemingly at random.  Its MMU faults.  The VME
bus dies.  All Ironics ever tells us is "well, if you updated your boards 
with this little thing-um-a-jig $900 hardware upgrade, that should fix 
the problem..."  

Did these people ever build a board right *the first time*?  It seems
like they are milking us for their own screwups.

Argh.

curt@omni.com (Curt Mayer) (08/15/89)

In article <1350@unhd.unh.UUCP> rg@unh.UUCP (Roger   Gonzalez) writes:
>Has anyone had experience dealing with Ironics?  We have an Ironics
>Performer (ha!) 32 running SysV, and it just loooves to crash.  It
>spits out trap 165's seemingly at random.  Its MMU faults.  The VME
>bus dies.  All Ironics ever tells us is "well, if you updated your boards 
>with this little thing-um-a-jig $900 hardware upgrade, that should fix 
>the problem..."  
yes. you probably have a P32 with MMB, the gate-array subset of the 68851.
this machine never really ran with networking, and the scsi bus dma and
the MMB had a lovely race condition. in addition, it was a bit slow in
handling system calls.

go ahead, spend the $900. this makes networking reliable, fixes the scsi
race, and gives you a vnode kernel with namei caching and a real vm system 
that works. i know. i did the upgrade.

>Did these people ever build a board right *the first time*?  It seems
>like they are milking us for their own screwups.
hey, motorola was late with the PMMU, and ironics (and many other companies)
had to ship *something*. most other companies don't even offer a PMMU
upgrade.

	curt mayer

p.s.: get a third party c compiler. the stock unisoft c compiler is sheer
garbage. i suggest gnu C. it's worth the money.