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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.