steve@tellab3.UUCP (Steve Harpster) (07/27/84)
I've been trying to get our Ethernet up for a couple months now and I'm running out of ideas. It seems to come up and go down on its own. Even rebooting has no effect. I suspect now I may have something configured incorrectly which would be no surprise --- I only have half of the documentation for the controller and I'm impatiently waiting for more to trickle in. Anyway, we're running several VAX 750's with the Interlan Ethernet controller. Each 750 also has 2 DH/DM's and a DZ-11. My question is where does the Ethernet controller go in the list of floating interrupt vector devices? My interrupt vectors currently look something like this: dm0 320 dm1 330 il0 340 dh0 360 dh1 400 dz0 420 Does il0 belong AFTER the dh's? Before the dm's? I moved it there after the dz and Unix couldn't find it at boot time. It came set at 340 so I left it there and configured things around it. A skillion thanks to any help. -- ...ihnp4!tellab1!steve Steve Harpster Tellabs, Inc.
steveg@hammer.UUCP (Steve Glaser) (07/28/84)
I seem to recall the CHAOSNET people telling us that the interlan boards belong at the very last unibus vector. I'm still not sure why you would want to give them the lowest position in the priority scheme... seems to me they should go at the second to the highest position, just after your uda50's, and other big-time cards. Possibly this will help? Come on now. Vector assignment has absolutely nothing to do with priority. DMA priority is strictly determined by bus position. The only thing that matters on vector assignment is that they not be overlapping. [At least on 4.1 and 4.2 where they probe the unibus space during boot causing interrupts to figure out what's where.] Thus, the only reason for configuring vectors following any particular scheme is that it makes it easier to run other systems which aren't as bright about finding things (say VMS and/or diagnostics). As for the rationale for putting the Interlans at the end of the bus, that's easy. Ethernet protocols already deal with lost/damaged packets by retransmitting so if you get a data late on a recieve, you can safely ignore the packet. Actually on the Interlan card, I don't think you'll ever get these - you just may miss a few NEW packets due to buffer space limits on the card. We have a number of large machines (mostly 780s, some 750s) with lots of Interlan cards, terminal interfaces (DZ and VMZ), tape drives, etc. We even had to hack the tm11 driver to deal with more than 4 tape drives and the dmf32 (aka VMZ) driver to not waste interrupt vector space. Steve Glaser, Tektronix steveg.tektronix@csnet-relay.csnet CSNET/ARPANET tektronix!steveg UUCP
dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (07/31/84)
If a UNIBUS device appears not to interrupt when it is set for one interrupt address but does work at others, then in the first case the interrupt is almost certainly going though a vector that the uba configuration routines have already reserved for another device. Berkeley UNIX, at least, doesn't give a damn where the device registers or interrupt vectors are, as long as they don't overlap and the vectors are in the standard range (0-0777, I think). So pick anything that is convenient. If you want to run VMS on the machine for any reason, you may have to use standard addresses and vectors.