Re: SCO Technical Articles to say "tata".

From: justin (justin_robbs_at_NO_SPAMhotmail.com)
Date: 06/02/03 

Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 13:33:40 -0600

> Considering the ISA bus runs at 8MHz and PCI bus runs at 33MHz or
> 66MHz and have a much wider data path you really don't want any ISA
> cards in a machine that needs to perform well. It's good that ISA
> is gone.

We are trying to get rid of the isa cards, but the pci version only work in
506 or greater. Half our systems run 505. The pci version are also much
more reliable.

> Bill Campbell seems to be having success with those - and as I
> recall also in a POS environment. Someday you will have to run in
> a mixed enviroment as things change.

Yeah, I know but if we can keep the variables as limited as possible it
would be great.

> >Plus all our hardware is Intel/IBM PC compatible hardware.
> >Wouldn't we have to start from scratch to go to all Mac
> >hardware?
>
> Mac hardware? Many of the PCI devices on iNTEL run on Macs. They
> just need the appropriate drivers. Same PCi cards can run in other
> places such as SUN Sparc systems - if there are drives. The PCI
> was the second platform independant bus in recent times - with the
> MCA being the first - though in the end the other MCA manufacturers
> dropped it. That bus could be 128bits wide - it was speced that -
> but I don't know if anything was made that wide. The PCI is now in
> 64bit mode - which I think was the max user available MCI. Moving
> 64 or 128 bits across the bus at one time is good sense. Another
> reason you need to get rid of any ISA cards.
>
> >That wouldn't be worth the cost or the effort, especially
> >compared with going to Linux. I was mostly being sarcastic with
> >that post anyway.
>
> iNTEL base platforms are the cheapest. There are other OSes
> running on iNTEL which are not SCO or Linux. Depending on your aps
> you do have choices.

When our app was written (long before I was around), the gentleman that
wrote it, wrote the entire windowing mechanism from scratch using screen
overlays. When they ported to sco (just before I got here), the decided to
keep the same user interface, rather than retrain some 2000 employees. So
we need an OS that can work with this text based windowing system. SCO was
also able to work with our IBM touch screens fairly easily which is another
important factor. The app is fairly impressive considering it was
engineered 10 years ago and the core is basically the same. The original
author also wrote in an extensive proprietary serial communication protocol.
I just finished converting a large part of the to tcp/ip sockets because it
never worked quite right when we ported it to unix. The original goal for
the port was the quickest, simplest port possible. Therefore a lot of the
way the code is written is still not optimized for Unix.

Anyway, thanks for the information. I always enjoy learning more about
Unix.

Justin 

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.487 / Virus Database: 286 - Release Date: 6/1/03

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ISDN testing
    ... ITK ix1-micro 2.1 ISA ... Advantage of using the two cards is that it covers both PCI and ISA. ... But when I tried to modprobe hisax, ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: 5 PCI slots, 5 cards: Are IRQ conflicts inevitable?
    ... I've never quite understood the PCI IRQ sharing thing, ... Backup modem (ISA) ... When I added a PCI DVB-T card one of the network cards stopped working ... interrupt sharing doesn't work well when both devices sharing the interrupt ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: [PATCH] yenta: irq-routing for TI bridges - take 2
    ... I understand you are trying serial ISA interrupts ... The known problems are with PCI ... which have PCI interrupts and don't need anything else. ... may be there are cards out there that need an exclusive interrupt. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • 5 PCI slots, 5 cards: Are IRQ conflicts inevitable?
    ... I've never quite understood the PCI IRQ sharing thing, ... Backup modem (ISA) ... When I added a PCI DVB-T card one of the network cards stopped working ... I found that I had to remove the SCSI card. ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: TI yenta-alikes (was: ToPIC specific init for yenta_socket)
    ... > as PCI SERRn/SERIRQ signals). ... but it can use "serial" ISA interrupts thanks to the chipset support? ... probe for serial ISA IRQs ...
    (Linux-Kernel)