From owner-freebsd-alpha Fri Nov 26 14:37:22 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from uni4nn.gn.iaf.nl (osmium.gn.iaf.nl [193.67.144.12]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0B678151C8 for ; Fri, 26 Nov 1999 14:37:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wilko@yedi.iaf.nl) Received: from yedi.iaf.nl (uucp@localhost) by uni4nn.gn.iaf.nl (8.9.2/8.9.2) with UUCP id XAA07051; Fri, 26 Nov 1999 23:22:42 +0100 (MET) Received: (from wilko@localhost) by yedi.iaf.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) id WAA09138; Fri, 26 Nov 1999 22:44:12 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from wilko) From: Wilko Bulte Message-Id: <199911262144.WAA09138@yedi.iaf.nl> Subject: Re: Miata support In-Reply-To: <14398.61799.797803.755607@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> from Andrew Gallatin at "Nov 26, 1999 3:55:14 pm" To: gallatin@cs.duke.edu (Andrew Gallatin) Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1999 22:44:12 +0100 (CET) Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG X-Organisation: Private FreeBSD site - Arnhem, The Netherlands X-pgp-info: PGP public key at 'finger wilko@freefall.freebsd.org' X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org As Andrew Gallatin wrote ... > Wilko Bulte writes: > > I'm looking for opinions on the Miata machines. PWS433a to be exact. > > Any good/bad experiences to report? > > > > TIA, > > Wilko > > Yes. Both good and bad. > > There are at least 2 revs of Miatas, but there is no labeling > difference for you to be able to tell them apart. The fact that they > have identical model numbers is due to Microsoft -- they would have > had to re-certify the the platform for NT with Microsoft if they had > changed the model number. Well... the newer ones should have a trailing -Px (x is a number) and the early ones a trailing -Rx on their part# sticker (should be on the cabinet somewhere). At least that is what I once found somewhere on the WWW (I think). Maybe you can check if that matches with your machine? > The earlier miatas have a horribly buggy pci chipset which cannot do Is that an early Pyxis chipset? > DMA Reads across page boundaries and which is prone to lockup under heavy > PCI I/O. They do not allow 'unknown' PCI cards into the 64-bit PCI > slot (you can override this, but it is a pain). They are very picky > about what graphics cards they will accept. However, if you have a > graphics card which works in the machine & are not planning on running > anything very I/O intesive (gig ether, myrinet, multiple U/W SCSI > channels, etc), then you'll probably be OK. Hmm. > These earlier miatas are characterized by having the Qlogic SCSI > adaptor as an actual PCI card. They have an Intel PCI/ISA bridge & a > CMD IDE adapter. They do not have USB ports. Hmm (again). > The later models have a much improved rev of the chipset & most PCI > problems are gone. They have onboard Qlogic SCSI, a Cypress PCI/ISA > bridge, a Cypress IDE controller, and have USB support. The only > disadvantage to these machines is that we don't support the Cypress > IDE chipset very well. I have failed (but not tried very hard) to > make it do busmaster DMA using the ATA drivers. I'm a SCSI addict so I don't care too much about IDE. Thanks, -- | / o / / _ Arnhem, The Netherlands - Powered by FreeBSD - |/|/ / / /( (_) Bulte WWW : http://www.tcja.nl http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message