[comp.unix.sysv386] 386 motherboard, 16 megs, and computone

pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) (01/08/91)

I am planning to install 16Mb of RAM on a 386 motherboard that actually
has a Computone AT8 intelligent serial card installed, addressed
in the range of 15MB.
I run ISC 2.2 on the box, and would like to know if someone out there has
managed to get 16Mb running and co-existing with Computone on the board.

Rick

pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) (01/09/91)

In article <1991Jan08.140947.27663@nstar.rn.com> larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes:

>>I run ISC 2.2 on the box, and would like to know if someone out there has
>>managed to get 16Mb running and co-existing with Computone on the board.
>Not I.  While the computone board runs just fine here on nstar - I have
>never been able to address the board below 1 megabyte (and get it to work).

I have a situation that is very close to your.
I am running a 3-high-speed-lines BBS and on the same box I do heavily X
development. My 8 Mb are no longer enough to get satisfactory performance
(I still have a 20 MHz board :-() so I would like to add some memory, up
to 16 MB. It seems not possible to get a Computone board work if you
have 16 Meg on the board (even if I have not tried it yet, just asked
around) and I cannot map the card below 1 Meg because all the available
space is occupied by my 1-meg VGA card, the hd controller bios, the tape
streamer bios. (This makes also me wonder where the 1-meg VGA video memory
is mapped... any clues?)
So it seems that I only can go up to 12 Meg on the board.
I read somewhere that you have a multiport board too -- how much memory
do you have on your box?(and also what kind/brand of motherboard you have?)

Rick
--
Riccardo Pizzi @ ESA Software, Rimini, ITALY
e-mail: pizzi%esacs@relay.EU.net -or- root@xtc.sublink.org
Public Access Unix @ +39-541-27858 (Telebit)
<< Object Oriented is an Opaque Disease >>

larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) (01/09/91)

pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) writes:

>So it seems that I only can go up to 12 Meg on the board.
>I read somewhere that you have a multiport board too -- how much memory
>do you have on your box?(and also what kind/brand of motherboard you have?)

Motherboard is a unknown - 33 mhz 386 that holds 12 megs of SIMMS
and 4 megs of DRAM - for a total of 16 megs.  Right now I have 12 megs
full - and would like 16 megs - but I honestly believe that I won't
be able to address the additional memory.  Prior to this motherboard,
I tried another (it only supported 8 megs of RAM) - and this one appears
to be 5-7% faster.

Computone's drivers are being rewritten by a third party - so hopefully
they will work sometime in the near future at an address below 1 MEG.
If so, then I should have no problems installing another 4 megs in this
machine.

Are you running X11R3 or R4?  R4 is leaner on system resources - and
from information I've gathered is much faster handling video IO.

-- 
   Larry Snyder, NSTAR Public Access Unix 219-289-0282 (HST/PEP/V.32/v.42bis)
                        regional UUCP mapping coordinator 
  {larry@nstar.rn.com, ..!uunet!nstar!larry, larry%nstar@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu}

pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) (01/10/91)

In article <1991Jan09.140231.9764@nstar.rn.com> larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes:

>Computone's drivers are being rewritten by a third party - so hopefully
>they will work sometime in the near future at an address below 1 MEG.

Who is rewriting the drivers?

>If so, then I should have no problems installing another 4 megs in this
>machine.

I hope the same for me...

>Are you running X11R3 or R4?  R4 is leaner on system resources - and
>from information I've gathered is much faster handling video IO.

I know that, I am developing with X since about 16 months.
At home I run the excellent Roell's server, and it is really fast when I am the
only user on the box, but becomes a little slow if there are two or three
more users logged in. Pretty normal I think, with a 20 MHz 386.

Ciao

Rick
--
Riccardo Pizzi @ ESA Software, Rimini, ITALY
e-mail: pizzi%esacs@relay.EU.net -or- root@xtc.sublink.org
Public Access Unix @ +39-541-27858 (Telebit)
<< Object Oriented is an Opaque Disease >>

bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (01/10/91)

In article <57@esacs.UUCP> pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) writes:
>
>>> [ Larry Snyder can't make his Computone card work with 16Mb ]
>
>I have a situation that is very close to your.
>I am running a 3-high-speed-lines BBS and on the same box I do heavily X
>development. My 8 Mb are no longer enough to get satisfactory performance

I encountered this when I went to networking and X and hit a hard stop
at 12Mb.  Everything was just fine when I only had 8Mb but I was not
able to find any address where the AT-8 would work with 12Mb installed.
Mine is a 33MHz caching Micronics and I did disable the cache in the Eth
megabyte and the Computone card worked well addressed in the Eth megabyte.
When I went to 12Mb (which stops in the Bth megabyte) there was no address
anywhere that the Computone would live at and function.  I could disable
caching and have it work OK but that defeated the purpose.  Ditto with an
AMI motherboard, and that one only has 4Mb!  It seems that different
caching schemes and large amounts of memory are more than the Computone
hardware can handle.

The symptom I observed was that the device driver came up and claimed that
the board was not there.  Just to verify that I hadn't done something
stupid, I went back to 8Mb and it worked, disabled the cache and it worked,
went back to 12mb with the cache still disabled and it didn't work.  This
is going to sound like a thermonuclear fly swatter, but what I did was to
put another machine on modem (and printer) duty and networked to it.  This
had two side benefits.  I was eligible to relax the security on ssbn since
people I don't know no longer had roaming privileges and their response
time improved considerably since they weren't competing for cycles with my
X development.  You might find that a "throw away" box is a viable
solution with some additional benefits.  It's a pleasure to be able to break
ssbn or take it down (gasp! to boot native DOS) and not get a lot of howling
from the dial up users.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {att,cs.utexas.edu,pyramid!daver}!ssbn.wlk.com!bill
              internet    bill@ssbn.WLK.COM   or attmail!ssbn!bill

larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) (01/11/91)

pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) writes:

>Who is rewriting the drivers?

someone who reads this newsgroup --

-- 
   Larry Snyder, NSTAR Public Access Unix 219-289-0282 (HST/PEP/V.32/v.42bis)
                        regional UUCP mapping coordinator 
  {larry@nstar.rn.com, ..!uunet!nstar!larry, larry%nstar@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu}