2 ESDI drives, and misc. flames

[steve at cdp.UUCP]

Can anyone sumarize the issues surrounding running two ESDI
drives on Microport V/386 2.2 ?  Microport technical support
told me that "some" Western Digital (WD1007) controllers
support 2 drives, and some won't.  This is not to say that some
revisions of the board work and others don't.  Rather, they
meant was that any individual card may or may not work !  This
concerns me, and makes me wonder if it is wise to try to run 2
ESDI drives at all.

Another interesting note.  In a fit of frustration, I tried to
link the 386/ix hd.o driver into the uPort kernel.  The link
failed, with undefined (global) symbols 'dpt1' and 'dpt2'.  I
find it outrageous that Microport decided to break the SVR3
driver interface.  After all, isn't the success of UNIX based
on the standard interfaces it provides ?

As another experiment, I tried to link Microport's Everex tape
driver (ev.o), into a 386/ix kernel.  But this also failed --
and you can guess who's software introduced undefined symbols !
ev.o references 'dmainitted' and 'initdma'.  Incredible.

Steve Fram
Community Data Processing (CdP)
{ihnp4, hplabs, uunet, ...}!cdp!steve