RLL and ESIX

[Michael Grenier]

>From article <PCG.90Nov11203147 at odin.cs.aber.ac.uk>, by pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi):
> 
> On 9 Nov 90 21:38:27 GMT, mike at atc.SP.Unisys.COM (Mike Grenier) said:
> 
> mike> I also have the Western Digital plain jane (WD1003-SR2) with my
> mike> AMI bios but ESIX consistantly panics in the routine
> mike> echd_read_vtoc() when booting the box after the tenth distribution
> mike> floppy. My disk is somewhat bigger than yours, .i.e 250 meg. The
> mike> S51K file system works fine.
> 
> This does not make much sense really. the vtoc reading routine is in the
  (good argument why it should be a hardware/driver problem)
> 
> Your problems seem to be hardware related.

I agree with your logic but sometimes life isn't logical...at least
when ESIX is concerned. I couldn't believe it either so I repeated the
test multiple times. Why should the S51K file system work fine but the
FFS one fail. Why should RLL work great under Microport V/386 and V/AT
and of course DOS if there is a hardware error.

ESIX with the S51K file system has been fine on this box.

.... another note....

When installing ESIX and you have a big non-scsi drive, you must set
partitions evenly if you are going to use FFS. It seems that the 
Fast File System will go right ahead and create a file system with more
than 64K inodes. This is bad in System V which uses an unsigned short
to hold the inode number in the kernel and will cause the kernel
to panic when mounting the file system. Scsi installation checks for the
above condition. ESIX technical support admits to the problem.

> 
> mike> Of course, my Adaptec 2372 disk controller wasn't supported at all
> mike> with panics in the hdintr() routine.
> 
> This may well be hardware related as well. 

Bah...humbug. This controller worked great on 3 different operating
systems. We also tried multiple motherboards and other hardware.
ESIX has problems here but I guess we shouldn't complain since this card
is not on the certified list..unlike the WD8003-SR2.

> mike> One thing I can say for Microport, my old UNIX System V/386
> mike> Release 3.0e was rock solid on the same hardware.  You can guess
> mike> which vendor will be supplying our UNIX V.4
> 
> But 3.0 (without the e) was quite buggy instead. Do not expect
> consistency in these matters. Also, have a look at Dell's (or Intel's)
> SVR4. If I understand correctly you can use your ESIX rev. D to get a
> substantial discount on SVR4.

Yea but Intel won't support 1024x768 graphics at all. Microport gives
me a 40% off on my old system. I don't know about Dell.

   -Mike Grenier
    mike at cimcor.mn.org
    mike at sp.unisys.com