rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson) (09/03/90)
We have a customer with an Adaptec SCSI controller who is trying to install a Hayes JT FAX 9600 fax board in his system. Relevant info (that I have) is the following: 1) Soya motherboard 2) 8 mhz bus 3) ISC 2.0.2 UNIX 4) Adaptec SCSI controller 4) All other cards except VGA adapter removed. [seg addrs supplied below, sed 's/://' if you prefer byte addrs] The system crashes or locks up when the Hayes board is installed, whether or not a device driver for it has been configured into the kernel. The Hayes board is an 8 bit device, no interrupts, no DMA, no I/O ports. It uses 2K of memory address space configurable between 8000:0 and EFFF:0. Several places have been tried (according to the customer), including the default CC00:0, D000:0, D200:0, and E000:0. The customer says that the lock up occurs after UNIX has been booted when the filesystem is mounted, and that the lock-up doesn't occur if the filesystem is mounted read-only (!!!???). Assuming the board is set for a D200:0 starting address, he says that the tell-tale 'magic number' for the Hayes board (the word ASHER), appears to move from D200:0 to D1FF:0 after the filesystem is mounted, which is the damndest thing I ever heard of. [Note the customer is somewhat non-technical, so it is possible that what he's telling me may be suspect]. I haven't run into any other disk controllers that exhibit this compatibility problem with the Hayes, which is usually one of the least painful boards to add to a system. I'm clueless. Anybody got a clue? Where's Roy Neese when you need him! -Rick -- Rick Richardson | Looking for FAX software for UNIX/386 ??? Ask About: |Mention PC Research,Inc.| FaxiX - UNIX Facsimile System (tm) |FAX# for uunet!pcrat!rick| FaxJet - HP LJ PCL to FAX (Send WP,Word,Pagemaker...)|Sample (201) 389-8963 | JetRoff - troff postprocessor for HP LaserJet and FAX|Output
dez@cbnewsk.att.com (daniel.e.zuccarelli) (09/05/90)
In article <1990Sep2.213403.5837@pcrat.uucp>, rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson) writes: > We have a customer with an Adaptec SCSI controller who is > trying to install a Hayes JT FAX 9600 fax board in his system. > Relevant info (that I have) is the following: > > 3) ISC 2.0.2 UNIX > 4) Adaptec SCSI controller > 4) All other cards except VGA adapter removed. > > The system crashes or locks up when the Hayes board is installed, > whether or not a device driver for it has been configured into > the kernel. The Hayes board is an 8 bit device, no interrupts, > no DMA, no I/O ports. It uses 2K of memory address space > configurable between 8000:0 and EFFF:0. Several places have > been tried (according to the customer), including the default > > The customer says that the lock up occurs after UNIX has been > booted when the filesystem is mounted, and that the lock-up > doesn't occur if the filesystem is mounted read-only (!!!???). > this compatibility problem with the Hayes, which is usually > one of the least painful boards to add to a system. > > I'm clueless. Anybody got a clue? Where's Roy Neese when > you need him! > > -- > Rick Richardson | Looking for FAX software for UNIX/386 ??? Ask About: |Mention I had the identical problem described above when trying to install the JT FAX 9600 in an 80386DX NCR machine. The problem is with the JT FAX card and the way it handles memory references. It ignores the control line that says this is a memory reference and just fires off the shared ram address being on the address bus with a read or write signal. This is fine except that on 1 Meg multiples of the shared ram address it also responds as if it were being accessed. The machine I was using had an extended 32-bit bus for memory only. When references to physical memory were made above 1 Meg but at the segment of the shared ram segment, the board tried to pull an interrupt which held up the bus until its access was done. This hosed the memory reference and caused UNIX to crap out (which was some version of ISC 386/ix). I contacted Quadram (at the time) and they said they knew about the problem and had a fix ready ( very minor), but that because of their recent purchase by Hayes, they didn't know if/when it would get implemented. I dodged the problem by moving to a 386sx machine. One word of caution, if you try to get support from Hates/Quadram, get past their technical support staff at all costs. I called them initially and described the problem, upon which they sent me a ROM upgrade !? I later got in touch with an engineer who could at least tell me I was on my own. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dan Zuccarelli - AT&T Bell Labs CB/RV INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. (614) 860-7023 att!asr1!dez -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dan Zuccarelli - AT&T Bell Labs CB/RV INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. (614) 860-7023
rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson) (09/12/90)
I recently posted the following query, and got back several responses by mail and news. First, the query and summaries of the replies, then my theory. Note that I did get a response from Doug Pintar who has not had a problem with this configuration. Me: | We have a customer with an Adaptec SCSI controller who is | trying to install a Hayes JT FAX 9600 fax board in his system. | The system crashes or locks up when the Hayes board is installed. Daniel Zuccarelli: | I had the identical problem described above when trying to install the | JT FAX 9600 in an 80386DX NCR machine. The problem is with the JT FAX | card and the way it handles memory references. It ignores the control line | that says this is a memory reference and just fires off the shared ram address | being on the address bus with a read or write signal. This is fine except | that on 1 Meg multiples of the shared ram address it also responds as if it | were being accessed. Robert Lin: | Rick, this excerpt from UniFax manual page 24 may help you with your | current problem with the JT9600 fax board: | "A long outstanding bug in the Hayes/Quadram JT9600 board interfers | with any use of 16bit DMA. This means the Hayes card cannot be used | in systems which have other cards that use it. For example the | Adaptec 1540/1542 SCSI hard disk controller." Doug Pintar: | I'm running a Hayes JTfax 9600 & Adaptec 1542B (have also used an A) on a | Micronics 25MHz (cache) motherboard from Gateway 2000 with NO problems at | all! Everything just came up and ran the way the FAX/ix documentation said | it would, and I was able to send a FAX the first time I tried. (Congrats, | BTW, this is almost a rarity in the Unix world [more's the pity]). Perhaps | there's some problem between the VGA and the SCSI/HAYES. This has been known | to happen -- some boards jam the bus into 16-bit mode whether they want to | be or not, and 8-bit things break. Stuart Lynne: | The problem is that the JTFax board will respond to addresses like 0x1cc000, | 0x2cc000, etc, even though it should only respond to 0x0cc000. In other | words, even though it is an 8 bit board that *should* be incapable of | responding to a 16 bit address request, it does. My latest theory: The Hayes JT FAX 9600B (aka Quadram JT FAX 9600) is an 8 bit card. Many of the replies seem to indicate that some sort of aliasing is going on. However, on the XT portion of the AT bus, the read/write signals are called SMEMR and SMEMW, and are supposed to be guaranteed active (by the motherboard) only in the first 1MB of address space. An 8-bit card doesn't have access to the upper address lines (which are on the AT portion of the bus), so it is pretty obvious why SMEMR and SMEMW must be defined this way (the AT portion of the bus has MEMW and MEMR, which are active for all addresses). So, it is difficult for me to believe that aliasing is going on, unless the motherboard is at fault. I think Doug may have hit the nail on the head, or pretty close. Its interesting to note that he runs a similar configuration without problem. Coincidentally, PC Magazine, Sept 25, 1990 has an article on page 443, "Facing the Truth About 16-bit VGA Display Adapters", which shed even more light on the problem. Its not clear to me whether the Adaptek or the VGA adapter or some other device is the source of the problem, but the theory goes like this: There's a signal, MEM-CS16, on the AT portion of the bus which a peripheral card must assert in order to switch the bus from 8 bit to 16 bit transfers. The peripheral card is supposed to decode address lines LA17-LA23 (also on the AT portion of the bus) and assert MEM-CS16 to request a 16 bit transfer. I don't know whether the bus timing allows for qualifying LA17-LA23 with additional lower order address lines. Without additional qualification of the address, a 16 bit card, such as the Adaptek or some VGA adapters, can only decode to a granularity of 128 kbytes. What happens, then, is that any 16 bit card located within A000:0000 to BFFF:0000 forces the bus into 16 bit mode for that entire range of addresses. Likewise, a 16 bit card located within C000:0000 to DFFF:0000 will jam the bus into 16 bit mode for that entire range of addresses. This is bad news for any 8 bit card that is located within the same 128k range as a 16 bit card, since it can deal only with 8 bit transfers. The solution appears to be to disable 16 bit operation of the VGA or other 16 bit card, or to move things around such that all 8 bit cards with mapped memory are in one of the 128k segments by themselves. If this theory is correct, then I would blast IBM's design as being utterly wasteful of the available address space. I'm sure that will popularize the theory, as IBM bashing is the second favorite sport here (after ISC/SCO bashing). :-) :-) BTW, the story has a happy ending, as the customer who reported the problem in the first place just moved the JT FAX over to a different machine which has a Future Domain SCSI controller. Thanks to everybody who responded, especially our esteemed competition. Its this spirit of cooperation that sets UNIX people apart from the norm!!! -Rick -- Rick Richardson | Looking for FAX software for UNIX/386 ??? Ask About: |Mention PC Research,Inc.| FaxiX - UNIX Facsimile System (tm) |FAX# for uunet!pcrat!rick| FaxJet - HP LJ PCL to FAX (Send WP,Word,Pagemaker...)|Sample (201) 389-8963 | JetRoff - troff postprocessor for HP LaserJet and FAX|Output