Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!allred From: allred@ut-emx.UUCP (Kevin L. Allred) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Mylex Motherboards - Why not? Summary: SCO says their UNIX works on 386sx Message-ID: <17241@ut-emx.UUCP> Date: 17 Aug 89 17:17:15 GMT References: <4843@bgsuvax.UUCP> <17144@ut-emx.UUCP> <1711@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Organization: UT-Austin, Dept. of Chem. Engr Lines: 30 In article <1711@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>, davidsen@sungod.crd.ge.com (ody) writes: > In article <17144@ut-emx.UUCP> allred@ut-emx.UUCP (Kevin L. Allred) writes: > | UNIX prices to drop. I do know that Intel says their UNIX won't run > | on a 386sx ( you figure the company that makes the processor would > | know what to change :-). I don't know about the other UNIX vendors. > Has anyone else verified this? Several 386SX vendors have sworn to me > that their systems would run Xenix and UNIX. Is this something > particular to Intel? I assume that you can tell if the system is an SX > or not, but why do it? Since my earlier posting, I talked to a sales rep. for SCO and he said that their 386 products would run on a 386sx no problem, but remember you can believe everything a sales rep tells you ;-). He did ask if I had an AT bus, and it was after I said yes, that he said no problem. Maybe there is problem in microchannel based 386sx systems. Intel wasn't very clear as to why their current unix product wouldn't run on a 386sx. It had something to do with not being able to do full 32 bit memory accesses in the first megabyte of memory (huh?). I have know idea why this would be a problem, as it should just take longer to do 32 bit accesses. As to being able to tell the difference between a 386 and 386sx, all of the 386 specific software I have tried so far has identified the processor as a 386 and run as advertised. To tell the difference, I think software would have to count the nember of clock cycles to do 32 bit memory accesses. I guess the time would be around twice as long for the sx. -- Kevin Allred allred@emx.cc.utexas.edu allred@ut-emx.UUCP