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In <CrDswJ.7qE@cti-software.nl> pim@cti-software.nl (Pim Zandbergen) writes:

>I tried my luck with a couple of BusLogic 747S cards. They were to
>run with ISC Unix 4.0. At that time

>Although the cards seemed to work fine, the machine would lock
>up when multiple SCSI drives are accessed simultaneously.
>This could happen when accessing both tape and disk simultaneously,
>but would almost happen immediately when accessing two disks.
>When that happens, all processes seem to keep running, until
>they access the disk.

>I have tried all sorts of hardware.

>At the time, I was unable to test any other OS than ISC.
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>Replacing the BusLogic with an Adaptec (1542 or 1742)
>would *always* fix the problem.

>The problem is that our BusLogic dealer says "the cards work
>just fine with SCO and Netware, it must be your ISC driver"
>and our ISC dealer claims I've got a hardware problem, as the card
>fails with two different ISC drivers.

It sounds to me like ISC has to be at fault.  I know of many people
using BusLogic bt747s cards happily under NetBSD and FreeBSD, and you
know some of them have to be using multiple drives.  I personally, run
a bt747s under NetBSD-current with a single Quantum SCSI-2 hard drive.
I have at times in the past, however, had an external SCSI-1 Exabyte
tape drive connected to the machine at the same time, and it worked
flawlessly (well, except for the damn tape drive eating a tape...
*grrrr*).

You might also check two other things: First, make *sure* you have
good SCSI cables and termination is completely correct.  You might
also try switching which device is the end of the chain and which
device gets end termination.  Also, make sure not more than two
devices have termination power enabled.  Second, have you tried this
combination in a different brand EISA machine?  Maybe your motherboard
manufacturer has a screwie EISA chipset or something.

>	1) Which OS are you running

NetBSD-current

>	2) Are you using native or aha1540 drivers

No.  This could likely cause you problems.  I am using the
NetBSD-current bt747s driver.

>	3) What is the firmware revision of your card

BIOS 4.70; Firmware 3.37.

>	4) What SCSI drives are you using
>	5) What kind of system/motherboard are you using

>The firmware on my cards is revision 1.37.

Are you sure that's not 3.37?  Otherwise, that sounds OOOoooooold.
If it is 1.37, I'd call BusLogic and ask for an upgrade.

-- 
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 Michael L. VanLoon                 Iowa State University Computation Center
    michaelv@iastate.edu                    Project Vincent Systems Staff
  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free Un*x for PC/Mac/Amiga/etc.
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In <CrDswJ.7qE@cti-software.nl> pim@cti-software.nl (Pim Zandbergen) writes:

:After the Adaptec AHA-1742 EISA SCSI host adapter went out of production,
:I tried my luck with a couple of BusLogic 747S cards. They were to
:run with ISC Unix 4.0. At that time, the AHA-2742 driver was not there yet.

I'm running 5 disks on this system with a BusLogic BT742s, 2 on
another workstation with a BT747S, and 2 hard disks plus 6 optical
drives on another BT747S.  No problems with them under ODT 3.0.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:  bill@Celestial.COM   Bill Campbell; Celestial Software
UUCP:   ...!thebes!camco!bill   8545 SE 68th Street
                   camco!bill   Mercer Island, WA 98040; (206) 947-5591
SPEED COSTS MONEY -- HOW FAST DO YOU WANT TO GO?

In article <CrDswJ.7qE@cti-software.nl>,
Pim Zandbergen <pim@cti-software.nl> wrote:
>The problem is that our BusLogic dealer says "the cards work
>just fine with SCO and Netware, it must be your ISC driver"
>and our ISC dealer claims I've got a hardware problem, as the card
>fails with two different ISC drivers.

Maybe problem with ISC's drivers. I have a  747S with two SCSI-2 drives and
a SCSI-1 tape and   have no problem  whatsoever  with accessing  all  three
devices at the same time.

I even know someone (Hi Bob) who have three 747S card with  8 (or 9 ?) disk
drives on one computer...

>	1) Which OS are you running

FreeBSD-current

>	2) Are you using native or aha1540 drivers

Native BusLogic driver  in EISA mode,  no  ISA DMA, Burst  mode, Fast x/fer
rate.

>	3) What is the firmware revision of your card

Firmware 4.70, BIOS 3.37.

>	4) What SCSI drives are you using

Seagate ST-31200N 1 GB
Micropolis MP-1624 642 MB.

>	5) What kind of system/motherboard are you using

Elite EISA/VLB SIS chipset.

>The firmware on my cards is revision 1.37.

Well, are you sure its not 3.37 ?? 1.37 seems very old...
-- 
Ollivier ROBERT                                           roberto@hsc.fr.net
Herv� Schauer Consultants                Ollivier.Robert@keltia.frmug.fr.net
PERL / MIME / PGP 2.6ui     FreeBSD keltia 1.1.0(Current) CURRENT_099#0 i386

Pim Zandbergen (pim@cti-software.nl) wrote:
: After the Adaptec AHA-1742 EISA SCSI host adapter went out of production,
: I tried my luck with a couple of BusLogic 747S cards. They were to
: run with ISC Unix 4.0. At that time, the AHA-2742 driver was not there yet.

: Although the cards seemed to work fine, the machine would lock

: The firmware on my cards is revision 1.37.
  you mean 3.37?

  last fw that worked on multi-ple drives was 3.36
  seems Buslogic doesn't seem to care
  but, look out, fw 3.36 has problem access ram >16mb (using buslogic driver)
  so tell sco you are running a 1540 and it should be ok.


  ps, we sell a 32 bit EISA card that runs 1540 software.  Needed to when 
1740 stopped production
 call dave in sales here for pricing (yes we export, take mc/visa and wire)

--
Michael S. Scheidell                    Florida Datamation, Inc. 
scheidel@inca.gate.net                  (407) 241-2966
Distributers of QNX Real Time OS Products (finger for more info)

I wrote:

>To help me out of this situation, I would like to know of anyone
>using the 747S with multiple drives

>	1) Which OS are you running
>	2) Are you using native or aha1540 drivers
>	3) What is the firmware revision of your card
>	4) What SCSI drives are you using
>	5) What kind of system/motherboard are you using

>The firmware on my cards is revision 1.37.

Sorry about this, the firmware revision is of course 3.37.
If it matters, the BIOS is revision 4.70 and the card
itself is revision A1.
-- 
E-mail : Pim Zandbergen <pim@cti-software.nl>
S-mail : Laan Copes van Cattenburch 70, 2585 GD The Hague, The Netherlands
Phone  : +31 70 3542302
Fax    : +31 70 3512837

Ollivier Robert (roberto@keltia.frmug.fr.net) wrote:
: In article <CrDswJ.7qE@cti-software.nl>,
: Pim Zandbergen <pim@cti-software.nl> wrote:
: >The problem is that our BusLogic dealer says "the cards work
: >just fine with SCO and Netware, it must be your ISC driver"
: >and our ISC dealer claims I've got a hardware problem, as the card
: >fails with two different ISC drivers.

: Maybe problem with ISC's drivers. I have a  747S with two SCSI-2 drives and
: a SCSI-1 tape and   have no problem  whatsoever  with accessing  all  three
: devices at the same time.


YET ANOTHER FOLLOWUP:
Buslogic just released technotes on 747s.  seems it locks up on NextOS!

Call Buslogic for 'sloppy mailbox' fix for BIOS.
(I guess they couldn't convince Next to change drivers)


--
Michael S. Scheidell                    Florida Datamation, Inc. 
scheidel@inca.gate.net                  (407) 241-2966
Distributers of QNX Real Time OS Products (finger for more info)

1) Which OS are you running 
	I'm running BSD/386 (from BSDI) & NeXTSTEP 3.2
2) Are you using native or aha1540 drivers 
	BSDI -> builtin Adaptec compatible driver support..
	NeXTSTEP -> native BusLogic BT545 driver (Betatest from a
	Czech firm)
3) What is the firmware revision of your card
	3.37/4.70 (I don't know which's firmware/bios)
4) What SCSI drives are you using 
	3x Quantum PRO, 1x WREN III, 1x Apple PowerCD, 1x Tecmar streamer
5) What kind of  system/motherboard are you using
	AMI/SiS EISA/VLB 486DX2/66

-peter

--
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    /  /    /  /             Grabmayrg. 18/6; A-1210 Wien; Austria/Europe
   ___/    ___/             (Phone) +43 1 387872 or 4000/91178
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In article <2tl4b0$3e0@rand.org> edhall@nntp.rand.org (Ed Hall) writes:
] : 	5) What kind of system/motherboard are you using
] 
]     Nice SuperEISA ver.1

It is (or should be) well known that NiCE EISA motherboards do not
support bus mastering DMAs in excess of 16M, just like ISA chip sets.

It may be that the EISA detection is not taking this into account,
probably because NiCE wasn't willing to put the string "FAKE EISA"
or some similar identifier at some memory location for marketing
reasons.  8-).

Drop down to 16M (potentially less, if the 384k hole below 1M is
being back-filled) and the problem should go away.

If you want to run more memory, ask for a hack to force the use
of bounce-buffers on EISA (not likely to happen in your lifetime)
or buy only motherboards with known working chipsets (I'm partial
to SiS for EISA, but that's just me -- and my very, very fast
machine... Sis has the fastest Gate A20 I've ever seen, too).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.

In <2u132p$1t4@u.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) writes:

>or buy only motherboards with known working chipsets (I'm partial
>to SiS for EISA, but that's just me -- and my very, very fast
>machine... Sis has the fastest Gate A20 I've ever seen, too).

Definitely.  Demand a fix or your money back if you still have a
warranty.  If your board was marketed as EISA but doesn't fully meet the
spec., I think you'd have a case to make some noise.

Like Terry, I love my ALR EISA board.  It uses proprietary ALR EISA
chips with C&T support chips and Phoenix BIOS, plus a proprietary ALR
386 caching system.  This is the fastest 386 I've ever used.  All the
components used on the motherboard are of extremely high quality (like
Brooktree 25ns static RAM cache chips back when such things were
barely on the market).

I'll probably end up buying an ALR Evolution V Pentium system down the
road, in spite of the steep price, simply because my ALR EISA 386 has
simply been the most reliable, fast PC I could hope to own.  When
everyone else was having problems with niggly little hardware
incompatibilities on various off-brand motherboards under
NetBSD-current, my machine continued to run flawlessly.  And this was
when I was abusing the EISA chipset horrendously by running a fast
EISA bus-master SCSI controller on the same bus as a 16-bit ISA
sloooow AST RAMPAGE+ memory expansion board.  Gawd it was slow back
then, but it never once hung or crashed from the abusive setup.  (The
machine is very fast; the extra memory was on the bus so wasn't cached
-- it was what was slow.)

On the other hand, I was just able to have a fresh experience with
screwy PCI bus autoconfiguration.  A company I do some Windoze NT
programming work for got me a DELL OmniPlex 566 (Pentium, 66MHz) to
use at the office.  The machine came with built-in ATI Mach32 video on
the PCI bus, a built-in NCR SCSI chip on the PCI bus, plus a second
NCR SCSI board plugged into a PCI slot.  No matter what I did I could
*NOT* get Windoze NT into 1024x768 mode -- it would refuse to go
higher than 800x600.  Finally, I looked at the system log, and it said
that the video and the second SCSI controller were trying to access a
small region in memory at the same address.  So much for that fancy
PCI auto-configure.

It's true that EISA requires you to boot up a configuration disk and
have all the configuration libraries for all the EISA devices you're
going to configure.  But it lets *YOU* set all the attributes of each
EISA device.  At least with EISA I would have been able to set the
addresses so they didn't conflict, to any value *I* wanted.  PCI
wouldn't let me touch the settings of the SCSI controllers or the
video chip (except for the most rudimentary settings like on/off or
video refresh rates).  There simply was no method available for me to
manually set the two devices not to conflict, and the PCI
hardware/firmware was too dumb to get them out of the way itself.

I finally yanked the second SCSI controller since I didn't need it.
From that point forward I could get the monitor into a beautifully
solid 1024x768 and even an interlaced 1200x1024.

Believe me, I do think PCI will eventually be *the* PC-architecture
bus to own.  But this little experience just goes to show you that it
still isn't quite there yet.



-- 
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 Michael L. VanLoon                 Iowa State University Computation Center
    michaelv@iastate.edu                    Project Vincent Systems Staff
  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free Un*x for PC/Mac/Amiga/etc.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In article <2u132p$1t4@u.cc.utah.edu>,
Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> wrote:
>In article <2tl4b0$3e0@rand.org> edhall@nntp.rand.org (Ed Hall) writes:
>] : 	5) What kind of system/motherboard are you using
>] 
>]     Nice SuperEISA ver.1
>
>It is (or should be) well known that NiCE EISA motherboards do not
>support bus mastering DMAs in excess of 16M, just like ISA chip sets.

It should be noted that the NiCE Super EISA Rev. 1 DOES USE the SiS
chipset, and does work with the BusLogic 747s driver.

Perhaps other NiCE motherboards have a problem, but I've not run into it
(we use both the SuperEISA and the MiniEISA here).

Steve
-- 
Steve Ward, Jr., System operator
School of Engineering, University of Portland
Portland OR
steve@up.edu

Terry Lambert (terry@cs.weber.edu) wrote:
: In article <2tl4b0$3e0@rand.org> edhall@nntp.rand.org (Ed Hall) writes:
: ] : 	5) What kind of system/motherboard are you using
: ] 
: ]     Nice SuperEISA ver.1

: It is (or should be) well known that NiCE EISA motherboards do not
: support bus mastering DMAs in excess of 16M, just like ISA chip sets.

Ahem, NICE makes at least two lines of EISA boards.  One is HiNT based
and the other is SiS based.  The latter board does support bus mastering
DMA in excess of 16M.

As it happens, the SuperEISA Rev 1 board is one of those nice (no pun
intended) SiS EISA chipset based boards that you recommend in your post.
So the problems probably lies elsewhere...

--twc