🚀 go-pugleaf

Richard Lamont (richard@stonix.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: In article <01bd805a$0dc10f10$0100b51f@dbqa>,
: 	"Tom Bird" <hamster@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes:

: > Linux won't talk to my Promise caching IDE controller (VLB) that I just got
: > to upgrade my main Linux box.  I have put 4Mb of RAM on it and it works
: > fine in Win95 with no modifications.

: If it is the DC4030 VLB, then:

: (a) the main IDE driver doesn't like it. You will need to compile
: a kernel with the "old" IDE driver instead.
: (b) there is little point in using a cacheing disk controller with
: Linux. It is much more cost effective to add memory to the
: motherboard, because the kernel uses spare memory for disc
: cacheing anyway.

The latest 2.1.* kernels include support for the 4030 controllers, it's
in drivers/block/pdc4030.c. There are apparently some problems with the
secondary interface but it is supposed to work. You also need to enable it
at runtime. It doesn't however support tape or cdrom only harddisc.

However you'll have to upgrade quite a few other programs to work with
the newer kernels. It's all documented in Documentation/Changes in the
kernel source tree. Whether this is worth doing probably depends on how
much you enjoy mucking about and getting things working. 

Cheers.
-- 
Mike Cavanagh.

http://www.emgee.demon.co.uk/
http://turnpike.net/metro/emgee/index.html