Performance in 486 EISA machines: ISC vs. SCO

[Rick Kelly]

In article <49397 at ut-emx.uucp> solomon at chaos.utexas.edu (Thomas Solomon) writes:
[ ISC and SCO stuff deleted ]
>A few other questions:  do either (or both) of these unices support
>486-specific commands (presumably increasing efficiency)?  How about
>features specific to the EISA bus, such as bus mastering (very important
>for high throughput in disk access) and DMA, and 33 MHz burst mode?  Also,
>can either (or both) handle _synchronous_ SCSI transfers to disk?

Bus mastering is not EISA specific.  Micronics, Intel, and Mylex all build
386 33 mhz ISA motherboards that support bus masters, and will do
synchronous transfer with Adaptec AHA-154xx SCSI controllers.

If SCO and ISC don't have support in their drivers, they are just plain lazy.

>For the record, we are planning on purchasing an Austin Computer Systems
>486/33 MHz EISA machine with an EISA, SCSI, non-caching disk controller
>(probably the UltraStor 24F), and a Seagate Elite (ST41600N) SCSI disk
>(rated for 3Mbytes/sec internal transfer rate).  We want to get an 
>operating system that will take advantage of all the performance of
>this machine.  By the way, we are considering putting a DOS partition
>on the disk, and using DOS for real-time data-taking, then switch to
>unix for the analysis.

Or you could experiment with VPIX.

Rick Kelly	rmk at rmkhome.UUCP	frog!rmkhome!rmk	rmk at frog.UUCP