clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (02/25/89)
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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