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From: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.)
Subject: Re: Tyan Tomcat II @ P5-166 or P5-200 Will It Work?
Nntp-Posting-Host: spcvxa.spc.edu
References: <cnordin.840091850@news.vni.net>
Sender: news@spcuna.spc.edu (Network News)
Organization: St. Peter's College, US
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 19:16:31 GMT
Message-ID: <1996Aug15.151631.1@spcvxb.spc.edu>
Lines: 40
In article <cnordin.840091850@news.vni.net>, cnordin@hq.vni.net (Craig Nordin) writes:
> What may not apply to BSDI is the IDE busmastering option
> on the board. With it, my friend, who has his main system
> hard disk on IDE, drops a heavily used server from a 50%
> resource usage to a 35% resource usage.
I think most BSD/OS servers are using SCSI disks. If you use something like
a BusLogic card, you get busmastering as well.
> NT makes good use of two processors. BSDI just sold Unix
> to and promised another friend that the next version of
> BSDI is coming out soon and will do two CPUs.
News to me, but I don't work at BSDI. I'd be surprised if this were true,
but I'm always willing to be surprised. Keith Bostic recently posted a poll
for suggestions about the contributed software packages for "V3.0", so I
expect the next release will have big changes (as opposed to the incremental
changes one would expect for a "V2.2".
> Another interesting option is that the motherboard lets
> you select between parity, no parity and ECC -- and the
> ECC looks like it works fine on parity RAM (what the
> manual says and experience seems to show).
Be sure to check your 82439HX (I think that's it, I'm doing it from mem-
ory) chip. If it's not a recent stepping, then ECC isn't really completely
functional. After the hardware gets there, we need to add an ECC handler to
BSD/OS so it reports the corrections. You wouldn't want continuous corrections
which degrade performance to go unnoticed).
> I'm wondering if anyone is using the Tomcat II and can
> vouch for its stability.
I've done some tests with the Tomcat I. The V3 board was pretty solid, but
the V4 board has some quirks with ISA Adaptec/BusLogic boards. Not many people
would use an ISA disk controller on such a system, but it's worrisome anyway.
Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing
terry@spcvxa.spc.edu St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
+1 201 915 9381 (voice) +1 201 435-3662 (FAX)