pingel@wang7.UUCP (Lee Pingel x14880) (01/09/86)
Does anyone have a driver for a DEC DMF32 controller? We are running Sys V 2.2 on a VAX 11/750. Please mail to bellcore!decvax!wang!wang7!pingel. I will summarize.
alw@mit-eddie.UUCP (Alan Wu) (01/22/86)
[] Regarding the DMF32 driver, someone at 'harvard' has been running with them under 4.2 or 4.3bsd for at least several months. You might try contacting 'sasaki at harvard'. My question is which serial async interface to get for our VAX-11/750 running 4.2bsd, soon to be 4.3bsd. The choices available seem to be the DZ11, DMF32, DHU11, and a bunch of third-party emulators. We already have 8 DZ11 lines and need to add 8 more lines very soon. As usual, we are on a tight budget. The DZ11 board would cost us about $800, and the DMF32 would be about $2200. Our machine (mit-eddie) has a large amount of UUCP traffic going through it, both mail and News feeds, via 2 1200-baud async modems on the DZ11. We have observed (in fact, it's hard to avoid noticing) that the system gets excruciatingly slow whenever one or both UUCP's are fired up. I'm not sure to what extent the DMF or other interfaces would have an advantage over the DZ11. (The DZ11 produces an interrupt for each character input or output, whereas the DMF has DMA output and a silo on input). Any insight into possible benefits / lack of benefits from getting a fancier interface would be appreciated, as well as any suggestions on how to determine what the other bottlenecks in our system performance might be. I am quite familiar with VAX hardware and VMS (no flames ;-) tuning, but I'm still coming up to speed on Unix tuning. Pointers on where to look would be appreciated. By the way, we are running with 2MB of the old 16K-chip memory. We are working on getting the funding for an upgrade to 4MB of 64K-chip memory. Is this likely to be enough? Besides the heavy UUCP traffic, we have maybe 2-6 interactive users. No database stuff. Two Eagle disk drives on an Emulex controller. Possibly will transplant 2 RK07 disks (already paid for long ago...); one for quick data interchange, the other possibly as a dedicated swap disk. Have a Cipher 1600bpi streamer magtape on a Dilog D132 controller, may possibly get a MassBus Adaptor and a dual port kit to share a forthcoming TU78 magtape drive on a nearby machine. I will summarize to the net if I get any helpful responses and if there seems to be any interest.