evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) (10/29/90)
Had all sorts of cute experiences trying to install Esix on a 486 EISA box (an ALR PowerCache 4e, I think it was called -- impressive little system). Most of the installation worked OK, except for two things. One was resolved -- the ESIX wouldn't recognize more than 16 Meg of RAM until some of the ALR cute caching mechanisms were turned off. The other is a bit stranger... The system was equipped with made-by-Wangtek 120-Meg cartridge tape subsystems, plugged into EISA slots. Using them would sometimes give perfect results, but just as often crash the system with a kernel trap and that horrid "trying to dump oodles and oodles of pages before I die" message. The vendor was stymied. The addresses, DMA and interrupts selected on the board matched exactly what the driver expected. As I said, sometimes it worked fine. But why the crashes? In a fit of desperation, I moved the board from the EISA slot to one of the two older ISA (16-bit) slots on the system. Behold, NO CRASHES! (I'm not totally out of the woods yet, tho'. The tape has hung once on an overnight, cron-induced backup run. Drive light stayed on, software woulnd't read or write the device until rebooted. But it's a hell of a step up from panic kernel traps!) So what's the scoop? I thought EISA was supposed to be completely compatible with the old stuff. Why would a board that works under ISA crash Unix when put in an EISA slot? Is the problem unique to ESIX or would it affect other 386 *IX products? -- Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / moderator, rec.arts.erotica ...quoth the Raven, "Eat My Shorts!" -- Bart