Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwvax!dogie.macc.wisc.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!koosh!curt From: curt@omni.com (Curt Mayer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m68k Subject: Re: Ironics p32 Message-ID: <792@rastafari.omni.com> Date: 15 Aug 89 03:40:32 GMT References: <1350@unhd.unh.UUCP> Reply-To: curt@rastafari.UUCP (Curt Mayer) Distribution: usa Organization: Omni Solutions, Inc. Lines: 26 In article <1350@unhd.unh.UUCP> rg@unh.UUCP (Roger Gonzalez) writes: >Has anyone had experience dealing with Ironics? We have an Ironics >Performer (ha!) 32 running SysV, and it just loooves to crash. It >spits out trap 165's seemingly at random. Its MMU faults. The VME >bus dies. All Ironics ever tells us is "well, if you updated your boards >with this little thing-um-a-jig $900 hardware upgrade, that should fix >the problem..." yes. you probably have a P32 with MMB, the gate-array subset of the 68851. this machine never really ran with networking, and the scsi bus dma and the MMB had a lovely race condition. in addition, it was a bit slow in handling system calls. go ahead, spend the $900. this makes networking reliable, fixes the scsi race, and gives you a vnode kernel with namei caching and a real vm system that works. i know. i did the upgrade. >Did these people ever build a board right *the first time*? It seems >like they are milking us for their own screwups. hey, motorola was late with the PMMU, and ironics (and many other companies) had to ship *something*. most other companies don't even offer a PMMU upgrade. curt mayer p.s.: get a third party c compiler. the stock unisoft c compiler is sheer garbage. i suggest gnu C. it's worth the money.