Esix Rev D. FFS and/or SCSI -- beware

[scott e garfinkle]

Just to warn prospective users of Esix.  First of all, their fast file
system (the Rev. D apaptation of the Berkeley FFS) appears to be flaky.
It will not work at all on my system.  On a friend's system (a normal RLL
drive and 25 mHz board), it caused the loss of an entire (root) file
system.  I have heard that others have had similar problems.  If you
are currently using their FFS, think about it -- sometimes their fsck
program doesn't recognize it as an FFS and proceeds to try to do an
automatic s51k fsck!  Also, the fs is apparently not appreciably faster
for many applications, in any case (that is, in this incarnation).

On another, related, front, the new (to Rev. D) SCSI driver is extremely
flaky with certain drive/adapter combinations.  It doesn't work at all
(despite lengthy attempts by their technical staff to make it work) with
the HP 97548S (and some other) SCSI drives and the Adaptec adapter.

Incidentally, the limits on the size of files you can edit with ex/vi
under Esix are there just because the engineers decided not to compile it
with the VMUNIX flag turned on.  Also, it appears that the Esix X11r4
implementation will not be released for the 3.2 product.  Kind of interesting:
there is no upgrade to SVR4 because "it is a separate product" and, yet,
upgrades to the 3.2 product will not be forthcoming.

Draw your own conclusions.

	scott e. garfinkle

These are my own opinions, unrelated to my employer.  In fact, I would have
posted them from home if Esix wasn't crashing so often.