Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1999 15:55:14 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD-alpha mailing list) Subject: Re: Miata support Message-ID: <14398.61799.797803.755607@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <199911262037.VAA08257@yedi.iaf.nl> References: <199911262037.VAA08257@yedi.iaf.nl>
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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. The earlier miatas have a horribly buggy pci chipset which cannot do 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. 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. 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. Cheers, Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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