From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 3 17:36:14 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id RAA16728 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 17:36:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA16721 for ; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 17:36:11 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id SAA04844; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 18:33:39 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199602040133.SAA04844@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Watchdog timers (was: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards) To: dennis@etinc.com (dennis) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 18:33:39 -0700 (MST) Cc: terry@lambert.org, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199602040010.TAA25981@etinc.com> from "dennis" at Feb 3, 96 07:10:15 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > >********************************************** > >********************************************** > >** ISA MUST DIE. THIS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE. ** > >********************************************** > >********************************************** > > >IDE is one of those heinous bogosities, like ISA, > > > >IDE must die; unlike ISA, this is negotiable, since you can always > >(stupidly) plug in a PCI IDE card. > > > the only possible explanation is that your are 'outta your mind'.... > > > you and the guys in their offices on 6th avenue should get together...their > the ones who think that ISDN should be all there is and get rid of POTs > altogether.....except whos gonna tell the old lady in tennis shoes that her > phone costs $300. instead of $11.? Probably the idiot who insists she own the ISDN->analog conversion equipment instead of putting it in the little green box that here and the rest of her neighbors connect into. Personally, I think ISDN is a scam, not that this has *anything* to do with whether or not it costs more in your opinion to leave ISA and IDE out... Since when did it cost more to leave chips *off* a motherboard? That claim is plain idiotic. > Your not the average user....the vast majority of users don need PCI (except > for video to run windows, dont need (or want) SCSI or most of the other stuff > you're putting on your dream board. 1) They need a disk interface. They can either have IDE (and pay in terms of performance and a limit on the disk space and a royalty to OnTrack systems for the ir boot manager and...), OR they can get SCSI. And then the won't need a new card for their CDROM, or one for a second disk, or one for a scanner. 2) The customer differences between PCI and ISA is: ISA PCI PlugNPlay no(a) YES Fast no YES 16 bit limit yes NO Passive probe no YES Runs out of IRQs yes NO(b) Lots of broken cards yes NO(c) (a) There are con artists who will try to sell you PNP ISA... report these people to the BBB. It's not PNP if it only works with some cards and not the on-board hardware. (b) PCI allows IRQ sharing. (c) What idiot wants broken cards? The average user could care less if they had PCI or ISA in their system until it came time to upgrade from Windows 3.11 to Windows95 or Windows95 to WindowsNT (at which point they then care a lot). It's idiotic to pay for things you'll never use. The "average" user never opens his box to install anything he didn't buy with the machine in the package offered by the dealer anyway, so he doesn't give a *damn* what bus he has, as long as it works. PCI works with a *hell* of a lot less trouble than ISA. Next you will be arguing that it is a waste of money to put 16 bit slots in a machine; the "average user" can get by with 8 bit slots. You and the guys in their offices on 6th avenue should get together... they're the ones who think that a CDROM and a sound card makes a machine "multimedia"... > Some food for thought...... > > You guys have been tossing around ideas about a "watchdog timer" board > for the past week or so.......just remember that you wouldn't be having > the conversation at all if you had to build a PCI card to implement it. Why; are PCI edge card connectors more expensive? What about the riser socket? That doesn't care what kind of bus you have in the machine, since it goes in the CPU socket. Or is it that PCI has the reset circuitly designe *correctly* (unlike ISA, PCI is speced -- it's not a PCI box if the reset circuitry isn't correct). Or is it that a countdown reset timer is an optionally speced item for a PCI controller chip? (see PCI 2.1 specification). 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.