geoff@hinode.East.Sun.COM (Geoff Arnold @ Sun BOS - R.H. coast near the top) (08/21/89)
In article <457@wet.UUCP> epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) writes: >[....] PC-NFS's 3C503 >driver will not run when I do this; it wants shared memory >disabled. [...] Why does PC-NFS insist on an inefficient operating mode? The choice was 3Com's, not ours. In PC-NFS 3.0, we added support for the 3C503, 3C523 and 3C505 cards. Rather than doing drivers for each one, we wrote a single driver to interface to 3Com's "vector" interface (one of the precursors to today's NDIS) and obtained vector drivers for each card from 3Com. In theory, this allowed PC-NFS to coexist with 3+ and share the board. In practice, out-of-sync software revisions by Sun and 3Com have made this a somewhat hit-or-miss affair, and in PC-NFS 3.0.1 support for coexistence is officially withdrawn pending further study. I have no idea why 3Com's software uses the 3C503 with shared memory disabled. Maybe it was to minimize software differences between the 501, 503, 505 and 523. Geoff Arnold, Internet: geoff@East.Sun.COM PCDS Group, Sun Microsystems Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- My disclaimer is available via anonymous FTP as a compressed tar archive....