APPENDIX - What We Use - Last Updated 01-Jan-96
We often assemble our own PC-clones for 2 reasons:
• we know what's inside;
• it's good therapy.
We can't do this for laptops and these have typically been the most
troublesome. We have a few desktop systems which were bought assembled
and they mostly work OK.
Some items work on the current development system and are not included
in the Plan 9 distribution.
The opinions and misinformation in here are all mine.
Motherboards
We like baby-AT format motherboards. Until recently we've used the AMI
Enterprise IV:
• 7 EISA slots, 2 of them with VLB;
• SiS chipset;
• on-board I/O (SMC FDC37C66[56]);
• PS/2 mouse port;
• processors up to DX/2-66 (will not take a DX/4-100 overdrive), will
take the P24T 83MHz upgrade (requires a new BIOS) but the cache cannot
be run in write-back mode and so the performance improvement is only
so-so except for floating point;
• 4 72-pin SIMM sockets, no pairing necessary.
All in all, a fine little board but no longer available. Most home PC
systems still use these.
We have three brands of dual-processor P54 motherboards using the
Neptune chipset, a single ASUS PCI/E-P54NP4, a number of Gigabyte
GA-586ID's (although they were sold to us under another name) and a
single Tyan Tempest S1462. There's little difference between them, all
have 256Kb or 512Kb secondary cache and no on-board I/O. It comes down
to what you intend to plug in:
ASUS PCI/E-P54NP4 Gigabyte GA-586ID Tyan Tempest S1462
_________________________________________________________________________
SIMM sockets 6 6 8
EISA slots 4 5 5
PCI slots 4 3 4
PS/2 port Y N N
The ASUS has a separate 3.3v power connector. If your power supply
can't provide that, you lose a PCI slot to a voltage regulator card.
The Gigabyte has more flexible PCI interrupts, allowing PCI
multi-function cards such as the GA-107A multi-I/O card which doesn't
require an [E]ISA-slot paddle-card (that in itself doesn't buy you
much - if you have a PCI multi-I/O card in the shared PCI slot you
can't really use the shared EISA slot for anything other than a
paddle-card anyway).
The Tyan is advertised as having optional synchronous L2 cache.
However, I've been unable to find a motherboard equipped with 512Kb of
synchronous L2 cache, it's rumoured to be unstable. All our dual
motherboards have 512Kb asynchronous L2 cache.
The ASUS has 2 90MHz processors and the Tyan 2 133MHz processors. A
basic multiprocessor PC Brazil kernel has been done.
We have some Intel motherboards (Advanced/MN) with the Triton chipset
which work fine. There are some weird things with the BIOS setup but
it's probably just unfamiliarity.
The only other motherboard we've purchased directly is the Gigabyte
GA-586ATE with a 133MHz processor. This is a very nice 3/4 baby-AT
size motherboard:
P54CT 75-200MHz
4 PCI, 4 ISA slots
265Kb pipline burst synchronous L2 cache
Triton chipset
on-board I/O + PS/2 mouse port
It's impossible to say what other hardware is in use, outside the Lab
many people run on stock PC-clones such as Dell, Gateway, etc. The
most recent purchases have been Micron Millenias which are just dandy;
they came equipped with Teac 6X ATAPI CD-ROM drives and Diamond
Stealth64 Graphics 2001 VGA cards (ARK2000pv chip, see below) and
worked straight out the box.
We buy ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards from
American NorthStar Computers
19 E. Melbourne Avenue
Melbourne, FL 32901
Tel: (407) 728-1550
Fax: (407) 777-1131
WWW: http://www.surfusa.com/ANC.html
Contact: Eblan Farris, efarris@digital.net or efarris@surfusa.com
They sell individual components and systems built to spec, we've
bought both without complaint. The cases are especially nice, allowing
access to all the drive bays without disturbing the motherboard or
cards and also allowing the motherboard+cards to be removed as a unit.
VGA cards
Here's a list of what's in /lib/vgadb with VGA chip type:
chip comments
STB PowerGraph X-24 S3 86C801 ISA
Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 S3 86C805 VLB
#9GXE Level-1[126] S3 86C928 VLB
#9GXE64 S3 Vision864 PCI, VLB and on motherboard
#9GXE64pro S3 Vision964 PCI
Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM S3 Trio64 PCI
Diamond Stealth SE DRAM S3 Trio32 VLB
Cardinal VGA765 Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA
Hercules Dynamite Power Tseng Labs ET4000/W32p PCI
Hercules Dynamite Power Tseng Labs ET4000/W32i ISA
Hercules Stingray 64/Video ARK2000pv PCI
Diamond Stealth64 Graphics 2001 ARK2000pv PCI
Diamond SpeedStar Pro CL-GD542x ISA and on motherboard
Orchid Kelvin 64 CL-GD543x PCI
Globalyst 250 (laptop) C&T65540 on motherboard
ATI ULtra Pro MACH32 VLB
AT&T Globalyst 600 MACH64 on motherboard
Support for the ATI MACH32 and MACH64 is minimal, only the dumb VGA
mode is used restricting the maximum resolution to 1024x768x8.
Most of the Enterprise IV motherboards have a #9GXE Level-11 VLB,
there are also 2 with Level-16's.
Subjectively, the Tseng Labs ET4000/W32p gives the best performance
under Plan 9, its only drawbacks being the lack of a hardware cursor
in 2x8bit mode and a maximum pixel-clock of 135MHz when used with a
suitable RAMDAC. The Hercules Stingray 64/Video with the ARK2000pv
chip looks good too and doesn't have restrictions on the use of the
hardware cursor. The Diamond Stealth64 Graphics 2001 has the ARK2000pv
as well and is, as far as Plan 9 is concerned, just as good. However,
Hercules has the definite edge with drivers for other'operating
systems'.
There are a number of cards out there using the S3 Trio64 chip,
they're cheap and perform well; the single-chip solution cuts out a
lot of the guesswork in getting the card to work.
Monitors
We use the IDEK 8617 and Viewsonic 17 17" monitors, and the Nokia 445X
21". We also have a couple of Nanao Flexscan 6500 21" greyscale
monitors which have some fans; it's cheap (~$1200), not very deep and
quite crisp at 1376x1024.
IDE/ATA drives
We've used Seagate 2.5" drives on most of the Enterprise IV systems,
mainly because once the system is booted we just spin it down; we
could do that with a SCSI drive but the Enterprise IV has an on-board
IDE controller so we just use that. They are slow, however.
We have a number of Conner CFA850 850Mb EIDE drives hooked up to
CMD604B controllers and they have worked nicely; sadly, they are not
made any more (the CFS850 replacement is much slower), and switched to
the IBM DPEA-31080, which is apparently discontinued now too. There is
also a Micropolis 2117 1.7Gb drive. It would not coexist happily with
the Conner, it always wanted to be master; the Conner worked fine as a
slave.
There are a couple of WD AC31600 drives around. They like to spin down
when the last sector is accessed but the driver has been fixed for
that. Every WD drive sounds like a ball-bearing rattling around inside
a tin can.
There's one Seagate ST31220A 1Gb drive which is very nice too.
SCSI Controllers
We use Buslogic controllers, PCI, EISA and ISA, and the Adaptec 1542
series. Those can all be handled in one driver (although that's not
the one in the distribution). There is also an Ultrastor 14F ISA and a
34F VLB controller around which work fine; those controllers may not
be easy to get anymore, although the 34F has been seen in firesales at
$60.
SCSI Discs
We have a completely mixed bag, all the way from systems with a single
200Mb drive on an Adaptec 1542 to one with 4 9Gb Seagate Elite 9's on
a Buslogic 747S EISA controller. Most of our drives come from Seagate
although there are odd drives around from other manufacturers such as
Maxstor and Conner. The Seagate ST31230N 1.05Gb SCSI-2 drive is fast.
The only incompatibility has been the dual-ported Seagate
fast+wide+differential Elite 9 and a Buslogic 757D
fast+wide+differential EISA controller. The single-ported version of
the drive works fine; the dual-ported drive has no on-board
termination and the conclusion was there is some incompatibility in
the way the active termination is done.
SCSI CD-ROM
We have mostly used the 2X Toshiba 3401 and now the 4X 3601B, although
there is a NEC 74 and 3Xi around which work fine too. The Toshiba lets
you read the digital audio over the bus. However, according to our
audio-grabbing expert the best drive we have is a 4X Plextor 4-Plex;
it can read the digital audio too and positions more accurately than
the Toshiba.
We have an old Philips and a new Yamaha CD-ROM writer. The Yamaha
hasn't given any trouble, the Philips is probably obsolete.
Non-SCSI CD-ROM
We've tried the Mitsumi, Panasonic and Matsushita drives which can be
attached to a Sound Blaster audio card. They're slow.
On the ATAPI side, the only one we've bought directly is a 4X Toshiba
5302B which just works fine. Other drives which seem to work OK are
the Mitsumi FX400 and the Teac 6x drive. One brand to avoid is Sanyo
(comes with a Micron Powerstation), the drive we had wouldn't execute
the drive diagnotics command properly.
Audio
Sound Blaster 16 or compatible ( not the SBPro).
Mouse
You just can't get a decent mouse these days. Logitech makes OK
3-button mice, but their catalogue keeps changing. PS/2 or serial, it
doesn't matter, we handle both.
Keyboard
You just can't get a decent keyboard these days. We use the Lexmark
Quiet-Touch. It has 84 keys, an optional numeric keypad (which we've
never bought) and either PS/2 (6-pin) or AT (5-pin) connector. The
feel is a bit dull, but it measures 13"x6" which makes up for a lot.
Ethernet Adapters
The 3Com 3C509 is a fine card, it's fast, autoconfigures, the only
resources it uses are 16 I/O ports and it's pretty cheap. The later
3C509B works too, although there is no support for the Plug-and-Play
option as yet. Don't bother with the EISA version (3C579), performance
is marginally better but it costs a lot more. The PCMCIA (3C589) and
the PCI (3C590) also work. The 3C595 Fast Etherlink III PCI card works
in 10BaseT mode, and has worked at 100BaseTX in a direct connection
between two systems (we have no 100BaseT hubs). There is a driver
which makes use of the busmastering capability of the PCI cards
(3C59[05]) but it's still in development and has problems handling
some errors. Note that early versions of these cards have a bug which
prevents them from using the busmaster channel in 10BaseT mode; the
bug is not expected to be fixed until early 1996.
Adapters based on the AMD 79C970 busmaster chip (e.g. the
Racal-Interlan PCI-T2) seem to work fine.
Other cards we have are some of the SMC (WD) series of adapters, up to
the Elite (andnow including the Elite Ultra), some NE2000 compatibles
(including an NE4100 PCMCIA card) and one Eagle NE3210 EISA card. They
all work but have nothing to recommend them over the 3C509.
We failed miserably to get the old 3Com 3C503 to work, the NIC kept
resetting as soon as we put any load on it.
Modems
Modems are not something we use much and have no real opinions. Our
Plan 9 FAX service uses a MultiTech MT1432 and an AT&T Dual Port
Express. The AT&T Keep-In-Touch PCMCIA modem also works.
PCMCIA
There's some support for PCMCIA controllers using the Intel 82365SL
PCIC controller or compatibles (e.g. Cirrus Logic PD6710/PD6720). Both
controllers in laptops and on ISA cards have been used.
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