Linux PCI-HOWTO

Linux PCI-HOWTO
by Michael Will, [email protected]
v0.5c, March 1995

Information on what works with Linux and PCI-boards and what does not.

1. Introduction

Many people, including me, would like to run Linux on a PCI-based
machine. Since it is not obvious which PCI motherboards and PCI cards
will work with Linux and which do not, I conducted a survey and spent
some hours to compile the information contained herein.

If you have information to add, please mail me. If you have questions,
feel free to ask.

Help with my style/grammar/language is welcome as well. I am not a
native- speaker of English and expect to make occasional mistakes.

Note: "on-board chip" refers to a SCSI chip integrated onto the
motherboard rather than on a PCI expansion card.

Also, "quotes" herein may have slight context editing.

2. Why PCI?

2.1. General overview

The PC-architecture has several BUS-Systems to choose from:

ISA
cheap, slow (usually 8Mhz), standard, many cards available>

EISA
expensive, fast, some cards available>

MCA
ex-IBM-proprietary, fast but not very wide-spread>

VESA-Local-Bus
based on ISA, cheap, fast, some cards available>

PCI-Local-Bus
expensive, fast, some cards available, the upcoming standard>

ISA/VESA-Local-Bus had some problems with high bus-speeds, and was not
very reliable, but mainly due to its low price and better-than-ISA
performance, sold very well. Most VESA boards should be stable by now.

EISA was reliable, but rather expensive, and intended more for power-
users and servers, than for the average user. It has fewer cards
available than other busses.

PCI now has the advantage. Like EISA it is not proprietary. It is as
fast as EISA (or even faster), and 64bits wide. This will be important
with the i586 (That Intel would prefer we call the Pentium...).

PCI is not like ISA/Local-Bus processor-dependent. This means you can
use the winner-1000-PCI in an Alpha-driven-PCI-board as well as in a
i486/i586-driven PCI-Board, except for the BIOS, but the hardware
should be about the same.)

PCI allows cheaper production of onboard components, and needs no
glue-logic chips.

2.2. Performance

taken from Craig Sutphin's Pro-PCI-Propaganda

Unlike some local buses, which are aimed at speeding up
graphics alone, the PCI Local Bus is a total system solu-
tion, providing increased performance for networks, disk
drives, full-motion video, graphics and the full range of
high-speed peripherals. At 33 MHz, the synchronous PCI Local
Bus transfers 32 bits of data at up to 132 Mbytes/sec. A
transparent 64-bit extension of the 32-bit data and address
buses can double the bus bandwidth (264 Mbytes/sec) and
offer forward and backwards compatibility for 32 and 64-bit
PCI Local Bus peripherals. Because it is processor-
independent, the PCI Local Bus is optimized for I/O func-
tions, enabling the local bus to operate concurrent with the
processor/memory subsystem. For users of high-end desktop
PC's, PCI makes high reliability, high performance and ease
of use more affordable than ever before; no trivial task at
33 MHz bus-clock rates. Variable length linear or toggle
mode bursting for both reads and writes improves write
dependent graphics performance. By comprehending the loading
and frequency requirements of the local bus at the component
level, buffers and glue logic are eliminated.

2.3. The onboard-SCSI-II-chip NCR53c810

One very nice feature of some PCI mother boards is the NCR onboard-
SCSI-II-chip, which is said to be as fast as the EISA-Adaptec-1742,
but much cheaper. Drivers for DOS/OS2 are available. Drew Eckard has
released version 3 of his NCR53c810-driver. I run kernel 1.1.78 at the
moment (9JAN94).

This works so well I sold my adaptec-1542B-ISA months ago. :-)

The NCR53c810-chip is onboard on some PCI-motherboards. There are
add-on-boards available too, for about US$ 70.00.

The NCR-patches and bootimages are available on
tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/ALPHA/scsi/ncr (approximately). Newer
releases of Slackware 2.0 have support for the ncr too. Newer versions
of the test-kernels (1.1.41 for example) do not require any patches;
they have the driver already included. Since Kernel 1.2 it is in the
standard kernel.

There is only one thing I noticed does not work with the current NCR-
drivers yet. Disconnect/Reconnect does not work, so using a SCSI-tape
can be a pain especially when using "mt erase" or the like blocks the
whole SCSI-bus until it has finished. This is very unsatisfying.

Drew said, he had most (all?) of the code done for half a year, but it
is not debugged, and he does not see working on it any time in the
near future. Rumors say, there is someone in germany working on it,
but he does not want to be put under pressure so he does not release
the name yet.

FreeBSD does support the NCR53c810 for quite a long time already,
including Tagged Command Queues, FAST, WIDE and Disconnect for NCR
53c810, 815, 825. Drew said, it would be possible to adapt the FreeBSD
driver to Linux. Any volunteers?

I personaly have the impression there are some important wheels
invented more than once because of the differently evolving of FreeBSD
and Linux. Some more cooperation could do both systems very well...

I use the NCR-driver at the moment, but I am inclined to shell out
some money on the new DPT-boards mentioned in this article. (Michael
Will, 09JAN94.)

2.4. Drew Eckhardt on PCI-SCSI:

Drew said on end of March about the SCSI on PCI: (slightly edited for
clarity in context)

The Adaptec 2940, Buslogic BT946, BT946W, DPT PCI boards, Future
Domain 3260, NCR53c810, NCR53c815, NCR53c820, and NCR53c825 all work
for some definition of the word works.

o The Adaptec 2940 suffers from the same cabling sensitivity that
plagues all recent boards, but otherwise works fine.

o The Future Domain boards are not busmasters, and the driver doesn't
support multiple simultaenous commands. If you don't (currently)
need multiple simultaneous commands, get a NCR board, which will be
cheaper and is busmastering. If you need multiple simultaneous
commands, get a Buslogic.

o The Buslogic BT956W will do WIDE SCSI with the Linux drivers
(although you can't use targets 8-15), the Adaptec 2940W (with one
line patch to the 2940 driver) won't, nor will the NCR53c820 and
NCR53c825.

o The NCR boards are dirt cheap (< $70 US), are generally quite fast,
but the driver currently doesn't support multiple simultaenous
commands, and I don't know when this will change.

o Emulux, Forex, and other unmentioned PCI SCSI controllers will not
work.

2.5. The EATA-DMA driver and the PCI SCSI controllers from DPT

The EATA-DMA scsi driver has undergone extensive changes and now also
supports PCI SCSI controllers, multiple controllers and all SCSI
channels on the multichannel SmartCache/Raid boards.

The driver supports all EATA-DMA Protocol (CAM document CAM/89-004
rev. 2.0c) compliant SCSI controllers and has been tested with many of
those controllers in mixed combinations.

Those are: (ISA) (EISA) (PCI)
DPT Smartcache: PM2011 PM2012A
PM2012B
Smartcache III: PM2021 PM2022 PM2024
PM2122 PM2124
PM2322
SmartRAID : PM3021 PM3122 PM3224
PM3222
and some controllers from NEC and ATT.

On a "base" DPT card (no caching or RAID module), a MC680x0 controls
the bus-mastering DMA chip(s) and the SCSI controller chip. The DPT
SCSI card almost works like a SCSI coprocessor.

The DPT card also will emulate an IDE controller/drive (ST506
interface), which enables you to use it with all operating systems
even if they don't have an EATA driver.

On a card with the caching module, the 680x0 maintains and manages the
on-board cacheing. The DPT card supports up to 64 MB RAM for disk-
cacheing.

On a card with the RAID module, the 680x0 also performs the management
of the RAID, doing the mirroring on RAID-1, doing the striping and ECC
info generation on RAID-5, etc.

The entry level boards utilize a Motorola 68000, the high-end, more
raid specific DPT cards use a 68020, 68030 or 68040/40MHz processor.

Official list prices range from $245 to $1995 (December 1, 1994)

Since I've been asked numerous times where you can buy those boards in
Europe, I asked DPT to send me a list of their official European
distributors. Here is a small excerpt:

Austria: Macrotron GmbH Tel:+43 1 408 15430 Fax:+43 1 408 1545
Denmark: Tallgrass Technologies A/S Tel:+45 86 14 7000 Fax:+45 86 14 7333
Finland: Computer 2000 Finnland OY Tel:+35 80 887 331 Fax:+35 80 887 333 43
France : Chip Technologies Tel:+33 1 49 60 1011 Fax:+33 1 49 599350
Germany: Akro Datensysteme GmbH Tel:+49 (0)89 3178701 Fax:+49 (0)89 31787299
Russia : Soft-tronik Tel:+7 812 315 92 76 Fax:+7 812 311 01 08
U.K. : Ambar Systems Ltd. Tel:+44 296 435 511 Fax:+44 296 479 461

"IMHO, the DPT cards are the best-designed SCSI cards available for a
PC. And I've written code for just about every type of SCSI card for
the PC. (Although, in retrospect, I don't know why!) ;-)" Jon R.
Taylor ([email protected]) President, Visionix, Inc.

The latest version of the EATA-DMA driver and a Slackware bootdisk is
available on: ftp.uni-mainz.de:/pub/Linux/Drivers/SCSI/EATA

Since patchlevel 1.1.81 the driver is included in the standard kernel
distribution.

The author can be reached under these addresses:
[email protected] or [email protected]

2.6. Future Domain TMC-3260 PCI SCSI

Rik Faith ([email protected]) informed me on Wed, 1 Feb 1995 about the
Future Domain TMC-3260 PCI SCSI card being supported by the Future
Domain 16x0 SCSI driver. Newer information might be contained in the
SCSI-HOWTO.

o Detection is not done well, and does not use standard PCI BIOS
detection methods (someone who has a PCI board needs to send me
patches to fix this problem). So, you might have to fiddle with
the detection routine in the kernel to get it detected.

o The driver still does not support multiple outstanding commands, so
your system will hang while your tape rewinds.

o The driver does not support the enhanced pseudo-32bit transfer mode
supported by recent Future Domain chips, so you will not get
transfer rates as high as under DOS.

o The driver only supports the SCSI-I protocol, so your really fast
hard disks will not get used at the highest possible throughput.
(Again, fixes for all these problems are solicited -- no one is
working on them at this time.)

2.7. other thoughts on scsi

James Soutter ([email protected]) asked me to add the following
information on Fast-Wide-SCSI-2:

Fast Wide SCSI-2 is sometimes incorrectly called SCSI-3. It
differs from the normal Fast SCSI-2 (like the Adapted
1542B?) because it uses a 16 bit data bus rather than the
more usual 8 bit bus. This improves the maximum transfer
rate from 10 MB/s to 20 MB/s but requires the use of special
Fast Wide SCSI-2 drives.

The added performance of Fast Wide SCSI-2 will not
necessarily improve the speed of your system. Most hard
disk drives have a maximum internal transfer rate of less
than 10 MB/s and so one drive alone can not flood a FAST
SCSI-2 bus.

In Seagate's Oct 1993 product overview, only one Fast Wide
SCSI-2 drive has an internal transfer rate of more than 10
MB/s (the ST12450W). Most of the drives have a maximum
internal transfer rate of 6 MB/s or less, although the
ST12450W is not the only exception to the rule. In
conclusion, Fast Wide SCSI is designed for the file server
market and will not necessarily benefit a single user
workstation style system.

Rather than buying a PCI system with a SCSI interface on the
motherboard, or rather than waiting for the NCR driver, you
could purchase a separate PCI based SCSI card. According to
Drew, the only PCI SCSI option that stands a chance of
working is the Buslogic 946. It purports to be Adaptec 1540
compatible, like the EISA/VESA/ISA boards in the series.

Drew commented that other PCI based SCSI controllers are
unlikely to be supported under Linux or the BSD's because
the NCR based controllers are cheaper and more prevalent.

I personally would tend to try the NCR-Driver.

According to [email protected] (Bradley Broom):

The Buslogic BT-946C PCI SCSI works if you disable the
option "enable Disconnection" with the AUTOSCSI-program
under DOS which comes with the card.

Ernst Kloecker ([email protected]) wrote: (edited)

Talus Corporation has finished a NS/FIP driver for PCI
boards with NCR SCSI. It will be shipping very soon, might
even be free because a third party might pay for the work
and donate the driver to NeXT.

Not every PCI-Board has got the chip. ASUS does, and one of the J-Bond
boards does, too. Some vendors provide an alternative as you can read
in Drew's text...

The NCR-Chip is clever enough to work with drives formatted by other
controllers, and should be no problem.

3. ASUS-Boards

3.1. Various types of ASUS Boards

3.1.1. ASUS SP3 with saturn chipset I (rev. 2) for 486,

o 2 x rs232 with 16550

o NCR53c810 onboard,

o slightly broken saturn-chipset I (rev. 2)

3.1.2. ASUS SP3G with saturn chipset II (rev. 4) for 486,

like SP3, but less buggy saturn chipset

3.1.3. ASUS SP3-SiS chipset, for 486

like SP3G, but SiS chipset, green functions, and no NCR53c810 onboard
anymore.

3.1.4. ASUS AP4, for 486, with PCI/ISA/VesaLocalbus

green functions, 1VL, 3 ISA, 4 PCI slots, only EIDE onboard, no fd-
controller, no rs232/centronics. Very small size.

does recognice AMD486DX2/66 as DX4/100 only. This can be corrected
with soldering one pin (which?) to ground, but I would not recommend a
board like this anyway.

The one I tested was broken for OS2 and Linux, but people are said to
use it for both.

The VesaLocalbus-Slot is expected to be slower than the normal vesa-
localbus boards because of the PCI2VL bridge, but without penalty to
the PCI section.

3.1.5. ASUS SP4-SiS, for Pentium90, PCI/ISA

like SP3-SiS, but for Pentium90.

3.2. Detailed information on the old ASUS PCI-I-SP3 with saturn
chipset from [email protected]:

o 3 PCI, 4 ISA Slots (3x16, 1x8 Bit)

o ZIF Socket for the CPU

o room for 4 72pin-SIMMs (max. 128M)

o Award BIOS in Flash-Eprom

o Onboard: NCR-SCSI, 1par, 2ser (with FIFO), AT-Bus, Floppy

The board does like most in that price class -- write-through cache,
no write-back. This should not be significant, maybe 3% of
performance.

The BIOS supports scsi-drives under DOS/Windows without additional
drivers, but with the board come additional drivers which are said to
give better performance, for DOS/Windows(ASPI), OS2, Windows-NT, SCO-
Unix, Netware (3.11 and 4, if interpreted correctly)

Gert Doering ([email protected]) was saying the SCO-Unix-driver for
the onboard-SCSI-Chip was not working properly. After two or three
times doing: "time dd if=/dev/rhd20 of=/dev/null bs=100k count=500" it
kernel-paniced...

The trouble some people experienced with this board might be due to
them using an outboard Adaptec-SCSI-Controller with "sync negotiation"
turned on. (This predates the NCR driver release; hence the use of the
Adaptec.) Please check that in the BIOS-Setup of the Adaptec-1542C if
you use one and have problems with occasional hangups!

There is a new version of the ASUS-Board which should have definitely
less problems. It is called ASUS-PCI-I/SP3G, the G is important. It
has the new Saturn-chipset rev. 4 and the bugs should be gone. They
use the Saturn-ZX-variant and the new SP3G has fully PCI conforming
level-triggered (thus shareable), BIOS-configurable interrupts. It
has an on-board PS/2-mouseport, EPA-power-saving-modes and
DX4-support, too. It performs excellently. If you can get the German
computer magazine C't from July (?), you will find a test report where
the ASUS-Board is the best around.

Latest information about ASUS-SP3-G: You might experience crashes when
using PCI-to-Memory-Posting. If you disable this, all works perfect.
[email protected] said he believed it to be a
problem of the current Linux-kernel rather than the hardware, because
part of the system still works when crashing, looking like a deadlock
in the swapper, and OS2/DOS/WINDOZE don't crash at all.

4. Pat Dowler ([email protected]) with ASUS SP3G

o ASUS SP3G board (it is rev.4 == saturn II)

o AMD DX4-100 CPU (need to set jumper 36 to 1&2 rather than 2&3,
otherwise it's set the same as other 486DXn chips)

o 256K cache (comes with 15ns cache :-)

o 16meg RAM (2x8meg)

o ET4000 ISA video card

o quantum IDE hard drive

o SMC Elitel16 combo ethernet card

Unlike some other reports, I find the mouse pointer moves very smoothy
under X (just like the ol' 386) - it is jumpy under some, but not
all, DOS games though...

Performance is great!! I ran some large floating point tests and found
the performance in 3x33 (100MHz) mode to be almost 1.5x that in 2x
(66MHz) mode (large being 500x500 doubles - 4meg or so)... I was a
little dubious about clock-tripling but I seem to be getting full
benefit :-)

The heavily configurable energy star stuff doesn't work with the
current AMD DX4 chips - you need an SL chip

I really need a SCSI disk and a PCI video card :-)

5. confusion about saturn chipsets

Pat Duffy ([email protected]) said:

Saturn I: these are revisions 1 and 2 of the Saturn chipsets.
Saturn II: This is also called rev. 4 of the Saturn chipsets.

As far as I know, rev. 3 never actually shipped, and (from a few people who
have it) the SP3G now has rev. 4 (or Saturn II) in it.

Confused? Well, the only real definitive answer is to get ahold of the board
and run the debug script in the PCI chipset list on it. As far as I know,
though, the SP3G board is indeed shipping with rev. 4 (Saturn II).

6. Video-Cards

Linux people have successfully used # 9 XGE Level 12, ELSA Winner
1000, and S3-928 video cards. The XFree86(tm)-3.1.1 does support
boards with the tseng et4000/w32 in accelerated mode, as well as S3
Vision 864 and 964 chipsets including boards like the ELSA Winner
1000Pro and 2000Pro, Number Nine GXE64 and GXE64Pro, Miro Crystal
20SV). Support in the S3 Server for the Chrontel8391 clock chip has
been added.

Trio32 and Trio64 S3 Boards like the SPEA V7 Mirage P64 PCI and MIRO
Crystal 40SV, are also supported, the Mach32 and Mach64 are supported
in accelerated mode, too.

The SVGA Driver

16bpp mode (65K colors instead of the usual 256) support for Mach32
boards as well as 32bpp for some S3 boards and the P9000 boards has
been added.

[email protected] reported:

o Diamond Stealth W32 (et4000/W32) -- Text mode works, X11 suffered
from "pixel dust", unbearable never got it to work and returned it.

o # 9GXE L12 -- Works, virtual consoles corrupted when switched,
fixed this with disabling the "fast dram mode" feature in his BIOS.
Does not get a dot clock above 85, though.

Genoa Phantom 8900PCI card seems to work well. Genoa Phantom/W32 2MB
does not work in an ASUS-Board. Tseng 3000/W32i chipset seems to work
well. Spea-v7 mercury-lite works perfectly since XFree86(tm)-2.1.

Spea V7 Mirage P64 PCI 2M with Trio64 works nice since
XFree86(tm)-3.1.1

ATI Graphics Ultra Pro for PCI with 2MB VRAM and an ATI68875C DAC run
well as [email protected] tells us: "It's humming right along
at 1280x1024 w/256 colors @74Hz non-interlaced. Looks great."

Paradise WD90C33 PCI did lock up on screensaver/X - this has been
solved in the newer versions of the kernel. [email protected]
(John Edward Bauer)

miroChrystal 8S/PCI (1MB) S3 - no problem.

7. Ethernet Cards

Of course the ISA-ethernet-cards still work, but people are asking for
PCI-based ones. The author of many (if not most) ethernet- drivers
said the following:

From: Donald Becker ([email protected]) Subject:
PCI ethernet cards supported?

The LANCE code has been extended to handle the PCI version.
I hope to get the PCI probe code (about a dozen extra lines
in the LANCE driver) into the next kernel version. I'm
working on the 32 bit mode code. I haven't yet started the
21040 code.

I'll write drivers for the PCnet32 mode and the DEC 21040.
That will cover most of the PCI ethercard market.

file://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/people/becker/whoiam.html

In the new testkernels of 1.1.50 and above, the AMD-singlechip
ethernetadapters are supported. With a pentium, they ought to then see
900K/second ftps +(assuming an NCR PCI scsi controller) at about 20%
cpu load. (AMD Lance).

Anything based on the AMD PCnet/PCI chip should work at the time
being. In the US the Boca board costs under US$ 70

8. Motherboards

The people who answered were using the following boards:

8.1. ASUS

o [email protected] - successful.

o [email protected] - half-successful, works, but...

o Ulrich Teichert, Stormweg 24, D-24539 Neumuenster, Germany -
successful.

o [email protected] - successful

o [email protected] - successful

o [email protected] - successful - but trouble with the serial port

o [email protected] and his friend - successful after solving
IDE-puzzle

o Lars Heinemann ([email protected]) successful

o Michael Will ([email protected]) -
successful.

8.2. Micronics P54i-90

[email protected] succesful [email protected] successful
[email protected] successful

8.3. SA486P AIO-II

[email protected] successful

8.4. Sirius SPACE

[email protected] - successful

8.5. Gateway-2000

[email protected] - no problems except the soundcard he tries to swap
[email protected] - successful, but... robert
logan ([email protected]) - flawless. James D. Levine
([email protected]) - flawless.

8.6. Intel-Premiere

[email protected] - successful [email protected] - successful
[email protected] - successful (Premier-II)

8.7. DELL Poweredge SP4100 [email protected] - successful

8.8. Comtrade Best Buy PCI / PCI48X MB Rev 1.0

[email protected] - "Works, I believe it has buggy Saturn chipset.
I would also like to add: I strongly recommend not buying from
Contrade. Their service is horrible. "

8.9. IDeal PCI / PCI48X MB Rev 1.0

[email protected] - "Did not work with PCI48X motherboard"

8.10. CMD Tech. PCI IDE / CSA-6400C

[email protected] - "Works"

8.11. GA-486iS (Gigabyte)

[email protected] - success with problems.

8.12. GA-586-ID (Gigabyte) 90 Mhz Pentium PCI/EISA Board

[email protected] - succesful

8.13. ESCOM 486dx2/66 - which board?

Works perfect except the ftape-streamer (archive)

8.14. J-Bond with i486dx2/66

Drew Eckhardt ([email protected]) - The NCR53c810 doesn't
work too hot (yet), but I'm working on fixing that.

9. reports on success

9.1. Micronics P54i-90 ([email protected])

Pentium with 90Mhz, 32M RAM and 512K L2-cache. Works extremely well (a
kernel recompile takes 10 minutes :-).

The board includes:

o UART - two 16550A high speed UARTS

o ECP - one enhanced parallel port

o Onboard IDE controller

o Onboard floppy controller

Pros: Currently, I'm using it with an Adaptec 1542CF and a 1G Seagate
drive, No problems. Graphics is ATI Graphics Pro Turbo (PCI). Very
fast. The serial ports can keep up with a TeleBit T3000 modem (38400)
without overruns. Caching above 16M does occur. There are 3 banks of
SIMM slots (2 SIMM's per bank), with each bank capable of 64M each (2
32M 72-pin SIMM's). Each bank must be filled completely to be used
(I'm only using bank 0 with 2 16Mx72-pin SIMM's). The CPU socket is a
ZIF type socket. The BIOS is Phoenix, FLASH type.

Drawbacks: RAM is expandable to 192M, but the L2 cache is maxed at
512K. While the graphics are very fast, there is currently no XF86
server for the Mach64 (well, actually there is, but it doesn't use any
of the accelerator features; it's just an SVGA server). I don't know
if the onboard IDE hard drive controller works; I'm prejudiced against
a standard that won't allow my peripherals to operate across
platforms, so I didn't buy an IDE disk; instead, I got a Seagate
31200N and a NEC 3Xi.

Mitch

9.2. Angelo Haritsis ([email protected]) about SA486P AIO-II:

The motherboard I eventually bought (in the UK) is one supporting 486
SX/DX/DX2/DX4 chips. It is called SA486P AIO-II. Features include:

o Intel Saturn v2 chipset

o Phoenix BIOS (flash eprom option)

o NCR scsi BIOS v 3.04.00

o 256K 15ns cache (max 512) write back and write through

o 4 72-pin SIMM slots in 2 banks

o 3 PCI slots, 4 ISA

o On-board NCR 53c810 scsi controller

o On-board IDE / floppy / 2 x 16550A uarts / enhanced parallel

I bought it from a company (UK) called ICS, (note I have no
connections whatsoever with the company, just a happy customer). I use
a 486/DX2-66 CPU.

Before I had a VLB 486 m/board with a buslogic BT-445S controller that
I was borrowing. I have 2 scsi devices: 1 barracuda 2.1GB ST12550N
disk and a Wangtek 5525ES tape drive. I was expecting a lot of
adventures by switching to the new motherboard, esp after hearing all
these non-success stories on the net. To my surprise everything worked
flawlessly on the 1st boot! (1.1.50). And it has been doing so for
about a month now. I did not even have to repartition the disk:
apparently the disk geometry bios translation of the 2 controllers is
the same. Linux has had no problems at all. SCSI is visibly much
faster as well (sorry, I have no actual performance measurements).

The only problems (related to Drew's linux ncr53c7,810 scsi driver -
thanks for the good work Drew!) are:

o no synchronous transfers are yet supported => performance hit

o disconnect/reconnect is disabled => disk scsi ops "hold" during
certain slow scsi device opeartions (eg tape rewind)

o tagged queuing is not there (?) => performance hit

There has been no progress on the ncr driver since Sept 94.
(current writing: 19 Jan 95).

If you get Windows complaiing about 32-bit disk driver problems, just
disable 32-bit disk access via Control Panel. This should not hurt
performance. (What I did is remove the WDCTRL driver from my
SYSTEM.INI).

All else is fine. I tried the serial ports with some dos/windows s/w
and worked ok. The IDE/floppy work ok as well. I have not tried the
parallel yet. The motherboard is quite fast and so far I am very
pleased with the upgrade. I have not yet tried a PCI graphics board. I
will later on. I am using an old ISA S3 which is fine at the moment.

9.3. [email protected] about his Micronics M5Pi

Micronics M5Pi motherboard with 60 MHz Pentium, PCI bus having the
following components:

16Mb RAM/512k cache
onboard IDE, parallel, 16550A UARTS
2 X 340MB Maxtor IDE Hard Drives
Soundblaster 16 SCSI-II
Toshiba 3401B SCSI CD-ROM
Archive Viper 525MB SCSI Tape Drive
Viewsonic 17 monitor
Cardex Challenger PCI video card (ET4000/W32P)
A4-Tech Serial Mouse

Everything works great, Slackware installation was very easy, I can
run Quicken 7 for DOS under DOSEMU. I run X at 1152x900 resolution at
67Hz.

9.4. Simon Karpen ([email protected]) with Micronics
M54pi

I have had no problems with the above board, the on-board PCI IDE
(hopefully soon will also have SCSI), and an ATI Mach32 (GUP) with 2MB
of VRAM.

9.5. Goerg von Below ([email protected]) about DELL Poweredge

- Intel 486DX4/100
- 16 MB RAM
- DELL SCSI array (DSA) with Firmware A07, DSA-Manager 1.7
- 1 GB SCSI HD DIGITAL
- NEC SCSI CD-ROM
- 2 GB internal SCSI streamer
- 3-Com C579 EISA Ethernet card
- ATI 6800AX PCI VGA subsystem, 1024 MB RAM

CAVE! DELL SCSI Array controller (DSA) runs only with firmware Rev. A07 !
A06 is buggy, impossible to reboot !
To get it: ftp dell.com , file is /dellbbs/dsa/dsaman17.zip

Apart from this firmware-problem there where no problems for the last
2 months, running with linux 1.1.42 as primary nameserver, newsserver
and www-server on internet.

9.6. [email protected] about Gateway2000 P-66

Gateway2000's P5-66 system with Intel's PCI motherboard, with 5 ISA
slots and 3 PCI slots. The only PCI card I am using is the # 9 GXe
level 12 PCI card (2 MB VRAM and 1 MB DRAM). This card was bought from
Dell. Under Linux I am using the graphics in the 80x25 mode only (I am
waiting for some XFree86 refinements before using it in 1280x1024
resolution), but under DOS/Windows I have used the card in
1280x1024x256 mode without problems. Etherlink 3C509 Ethernet card,
Mitsumi bus-interface card, Adaptec 1542C SCSI interface card and
additional serial/parallel ports card (which makes the total of serial
ports 3).

I have total of 32 MB RAM (recognized and used by both Linux and DOS).
There is also a bus mouse (Microsoft in the PS2 mode).

No problems so far.

9.7. James D. Levine ([email protected]) with Gateway2000

Gateway 2000 P5-60 with an Intel Mercury motherboard, AMI-Flash-BIOS,
(1.00.03.AF1, (c)'92) 16M RAM, on-board IDE controller and an ATI AX0
(Mach32 Ultra XLR) PCI display adapter. He had absolutely no problems
with the hardware so far but has not tried anything fancy, such as
accelerated IDE drivers or SCSI support.

9.8. [email protected] with SPACE

SPACE-board, 8MB RAM, S3 805 1MB DRAM PCI 260MB Seagate IDE-hard disk
because of lack of NCR53c810-Driver, 0.99pl15d, does seem to work
well.

9.9. [email protected] with INTEL

17 machines running a 60Mhz-i586 on Intel-Premier-PCI-Board

9.10. Jermoe Meyers ([email protected]) with Intel Premiere

Motherboard - Intel Premiere Plato-babyAT 90mhz with Buslogic bt946c
w/4.86 mcode w/4.22 autoSCSI firmware, (note, mine came with 4.80
mcode and 4.17 autoSCSI firmware. (interrupt pins A,B,C conform to
respective PCI slots!) ATI Xpression (Mach64) - using driver from
sunsite, (running AcerView 56L monitor).

The motherboard has 4 IDE drives, Linux (Slackware 2.0) sees the first
two and everything on the Buslogic as it emulates an adaptec 1542.
Uh, yes, Dos sees them all. Buslogic is VERY accomodating in regards
to shipping upgraded chips (you will have to know how to change PLCC
(plastic leaded chip carrier) chips, 3 of them. Though, don't let
that scare you :-) it's not that tough. Get a low end PLCC removal
tool, and your in business. You also might want to "flash upgrade
your system bios from Intel's IPAN BBS, a trivial process. Whats even
more interesting is I also have a Sound Blaster SCSI-2 running a scsi
CDROM drive off it's adaptech 1522 onboard controller. So thats 4 IDE
drives (2 under Linux) and 2 SCSI-2 controllers.

I hope this helps others who are struggling with PCI technology use
Linux! Jerry ([email protected])

9.11. Timothy Demarest ([email protected]) Intel Plato Premiere II

My system is configured as follows: 16Mb 60ns RAM, 3Com Etherlink-III
53C809 ethernet card (using 10base2), ATI Mach 64 2Mb VRAM, Toshiba 2x
SCSI CDROM, NCR 53c810 PCI SCSI, Syquest 3270 270Mb Cartridge Drive,
Viewsonic 17 monitor, Pentium-90 (FDIV Bug Free). Running Slackware
2.1.0, Kernel 1.2.0, with other misc patches/upgrades.

Everything is functioning flawlessly. I dont recommend the Syquest
drives. I have used the 3105 and the 3270 and both a very, very
fragile. Also, the cartridges are easily damaged and I have had
frequent problems with them. I am in the process of looking for
alternative removable storage (MO, Zip, Minidisc, etc).

Some information you might need:

9.11.1. Flash Bios upgrades

Flash Bios updates can be ftp'd from
wuarchive.wustl.edu:/pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/plato. The current version is
1.00.12.AX1. The BIOS upgrades *must* be done in order. 1.00.03.AZ1
to 1.00.06.AX1 to 1.00.08.AX1 to 1.00.10.AX1 to 1.00.12.AX1. The
Flash BIOS updates can also be downloaded from the Intel BBS. I do
not have that number right now.

9.11.2. NCR 53c810 BIOSless PCI SCSI

If you are using an NCR 53c810 BIOSless PCI SCSI card in the Plato,
you may have trouble getting the card to be recognized. I had to
change one of the jumpers on the NCR card: the jumper that controls
whether there is 1 or 2 NCR SCSI cards in your system must be set to
"2". I dont know why, but this is how I got it to work. The other
jumper controls the INT setting (A,B,C,D). I left mine at A (the
default).

9.11.3. apart from that - plug and play!

There are no settings in the motherboard BIOS for setting the NCR
53c810. Dont worry - once the card is jumpered correctly, it will be
recognized! So much for PCI Plug-n-Play!

9.12. [email protected] with ASUS

ASUS-PCI-Board (SP3) having:

o -- Asus PCI-Board with AMD 486/dx2-66 and 16M RAM

o -- Fujitsu 2196ESA 1G SCSI-II

o -- Future Domain 850MEX Controller (cheap-SCSI-Controller, almost a
clone to Seagate's ST01... want's to use ncr53c810 as soon as the
driver comes out

o -- ATI Graphics Ultra (the older one with Mach-8 Chip, ISA-Bus)

o -- Slackware 1.1.1

He just exchanged the boards, plugged his cards in, connected the
cables, and it worked perfect. He does not use any PCI-Cards yet,
though.

9.13. [email protected] with ASUS

ASUS-PCI-Board with 486DX66/2, miro-crystal 8s PCI driven by the
S3-drivers of XFree86-2.0, using the onboard SCSI-Chip. No problems
with compatibility at all.

9.14. Lars Heinemann ([email protected]) with ASUS

ASUS PCI/I-486SP3 Motherboard w/ 486DX2/66 and 16M RAM (2x8),
miroChrystal 8S/PCI (1MB) S3, Soundblaster PRO, Adaptec 1542b (3.20
ROM) SCSI host adapter with two hard disks (Fujitsu M2694ESA u.
Quantum LPS52) and a QIC-150 Streamer attached. No problems at all!

9.15. [email protected] with ASUS

ASUS PCI/I-486SP3 / i486DX2-66 / 8 MB PS/2 70 ns BIOS: Award v 4.50
CPU TO DRAM write buffer: enabled CPU TO PCI write buffer: enabled PCI
TO DRAM write buffer: disabled, unchangeable CPU TO PCI burst write:
enabled Miro Crystal 8s PCI - S3 P86C805 - 1MB DRAM

Quantum LPS 540S SCSI-Harddisk on NCR53c810-controller.

9.16. robert logan ([email protected] with GW/2000)

Gateway 2000 4DX2-66P 16 Megs RAM, PCI ATI AX0 2MB DRAM (ATI GUP). WD
2540 Hard Disk (528 Megs) CrystalScan 1776LE 17inch. (Runs up to
1280x1024) Slackware 1.1.2 (0.99pl15f)

It is giving no problems. He uses SLIP for networking and an Orchid-
Soundwave-32 for niceties, awaiting the NCR-Driver. The only problem
he has is that the IDE-Drive could be much faster on the PCI-IDE. It
is one of the new Western Digital fast drives and in DOS/WfW it
absolutely screams - on Linux it is just as slow as a good IDE-Drive.

9.17. [email protected] and his friend use ASUS

Archie and his friend have rather similar configurations:

o ASUS PCI-SP3 board (4 ISA, 3 PCI)

o Intel 486DX2/66

o Genoa Phantom 8900PCI card (friend: Tseng 3000/W32i chipset)

o Maxtor 345 MB IDE hard drive

o Supra 14.4 internal modem

o ViewSonic 6e monitor (Archie)

o NEC Multisync 4fge (friend)

o Slackware 1.2.0

The onboard-SCSI is disabled. First there were problems with the IDE-
drive: ``on the board there's a jumper which selects whether IRQ14
comes from the ISA bus or the PCI bus. The manual has an example where
they show connecting it to PCI INT-A. Well, we did that just like the
example... but then later our IDE drive would not work (the IDE
controller is on board). Had to take it back. The guys at NCA were
puzzled, then traced it back to this jumper. I guess the IDE
controller uses IRQ14 or something? That's not documented anywhere in
the manual. Other than that, seems to be kicking ass nicely now.
Running X, modeming, etc. (for the Supra you have to explicitly tell
the kernel that the COM port has a 16550A using setserial (in
Slackware /etc/rc.d/rc.serial))''.

9.18. Michael Will with ASUS-SP3 486 (the old one)

used the following:

o ASUS PCI-SP3-Board with 486dx2/66 and 16M RAM

o NCR53c810-SCSI-II chip driving a 1GB-Seagate-SCSI-II disk and a
Wangtec-tape

o ATI-GUP PCI Mach32 Graphics card with 2M VRAM running perfectly
with XFree86(tm)-3.1 8bpp and 16bpp

o Linux kernel 1.1.69

It runs perfectly and I am content with the speed, the ATI-GUP-PCI
(Mach32) does not give as good benchmarks as expected, though. Since I
got the money by now, I got me an ASUS-SP4 with P90 which gives me
better throughput on Mach32-PCI... If I had even more money I'd get
me another 16M of RAM and a Mach64-PCI with 4M RAM, though... I still
keep on dreaming :-)

9.19. Karl Keyte ([email protected]) Gigabyte GA586 Pentium

o PCI/EISA Board Gigabyte GA586-ID 90MHz Pentium (dual processor, one
fitted)

o 32M RAM

o SCSI - no scsi-NCR-chip on-board, using Adaptec 1542C,

o PCI ATI GUP 2M VRAM

o Adaptec 1742 EISA SCSI controller

o Soundblaster 16

o usual I/O

Everything under DOS AND Linux works perfectly. No problem
whatsoever. A VERY fast machine! BYTE Unix benchmarks place it about
the same as a Sun SuperSPARC-20 running Solaris 2.3. The PC is faster
for integer arithmetic and process stuff (including context
switching). The SPARC is faster for floating point and one of the
disk benchmarks.

9.20. [email protected] with G/W 2000

He uses a Gateway 2000 with no problems, except the soundcard (which
one?). He is trading it in for a genuine soundblaster in hopes that
will help.

9.21. Joerg Wedeck ([email protected]) / ESCOM

originaly buyed a 486 DX2/66 from ESCOM (which board?) with onboard
IDE and without (!) onboard NCR-SCSI-chip. ISA-adaptec 1542cf scsi-
controller instead spea v7 mercury lite (s3, PCI, 1MB), ISA-
Soundblaster-16, mitsumi-cdrom (the slower one). Everything except
the archive-streamer works with no problems. The spea-v7 works
perfectly since XFree86-2.1

He abandoned the Intel-board in favour of an ASUS-SP3-g and has some
problems with PCI-to-Memory burstmode which is crashing only on Linux,
"looking like a deadlock in the swapper". If you have any information
on this, please eMail the maintainer of the PCI-HOWTO.

After turning off the PCI-to-Memory posting feature it just works
perfect.

Rather than sending him mail please read his http-homepage at
"http://wsiserv.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/ jw" where he keeps
information about his PCI-system, too.

9.22. Ulrich Teichert / ASUS

ASUS-PCI board with AMD486dx40 (but actually running at 33Mhz?!) His
ISA-ET3000 Optima 1024A ISA works nice. No problems with Quantum540S
SCSI Harddisk attached to the onboard NCR53c810.

10. Reports of problems

10.1. [email protected] and SCSI-PCI-SC200

He reports that after plugging that card into his Pentium-board, Linux
no longer boots. My first guess is that it is not supported.

10.2. [email protected] G/W 2000

Gateway 2000 G/W 2000 4DX2/66 PCI ATI-Graphics-Ultra-Pro IDE of
indeterminate make

It works well - only the IDE-Card runs in ISA-compatibility-mode, and
works a lot faster when switched into PCI-Mode by a DOS-program...
thus it's not that fast in Linux, and a patch would be nice.

10.3. [email protected] (Frank Hofmann) / ASUS

He uses the ASUS-board with 16MB-RAM, ISA-based S3/928, and the
onboard-IDE-controller with a Seagate ST4550A harddisk. He's had no
trouble with the newer Linux-kernels.
His problem:

using X, my mouse is not responding the way I was used to before. It's
sometimes behind movement and makes jumps if moved quickly. I think
this was discussed In a Linux newsgroup before (I don't know which
one) and is due to the use of 16550 serial chips for the onboard
serial interfaces. After two weeks, I got used to it :-)

Reducing the threshold of the 16550 should help. There should be a
patch to setserial available somewhere, but I do not know where.

10.4. [email protected] (Axel Mahler) / ASUS

ASUS PCI/I-486SP3 Motherboard (Award BIOS 4.50), 16 MB RAM the on-
Board NCR Chip is disabled, he had the Genoa Phantom/W32 2MB for PCI
and a Adaptec AHA-1542CF (BIOS v2.01) connected to:

o an IBM 1.05 GB Harddisk

o a Toshiba CD-ROM (XM4101-B)

o a HP DAT-Streamer (2GB)

when creating the filesystems, 'mke2fs' (0.4, v. 1.11.93) hung and
installation was impossible. After replacing the Genoa Phantom/W32 2MB
PCI with an ELSA Winner 1000 2MB PCI it worked perfectly. He tested
it with an old Eizo VGA-ISA and it worked as well, so the problem was
in the Genoa-PCI-card.

10.5. Frank Strauss ([email protected]) / ASUS

ASUS SP3 Board i486DX2/66 NCR53c810 disabled Adaptec 1542B in ISA Slot
with 2 hard drives (200MB Maxtor, 420MB Fijutsu), SyQuest 88MB and
Tandberg Streamer ELSA Winner 1000 PCI, 1MB-VRAM Soundblaster Pro in
ISA Slot at IRQ 5 Onboard IDE disabled Onboard serial, parallel, FD
enabled

After a reset, the machine sometimes 'hangs' (soft and hard-reset the
same) - this is probably not related to the Adaptec and the Soundcard,
because even without these the system sometimes fails to come up. But
if it runs, (and the ELSA-WINNER-1000-PCI-message appears) it runs ok.

The two serial ports are detected as 16550 as they should, but at some
mailbox-sessions there was heavy data-loss at V42bis... The problem
seems to be in the hardware...

CPU>-PCI-Burst seems to work well with DOS/MS-Windows

CPU->PCI-Burst does not work properly with linux0.99p15, Messing up
when switching the virtual-consoles, crashing completely when calling
big apps like ghostview, or xdvi, leaving the SCSI-LED on (!).

(I suspect these apps would be using a lot of CPU->PCI-burst because
of the big heap of data to transmit to the PCI-Winner-1000)

After disabling CPU->PCI-Burst, it works well, the Winner-1000 at
1152x846 (not much font cache with 1MB) does 93k xstones. OpaqueMove
with twm is more than just endureable :-)

He has got a SATURN.EXE which he loads under DOS before starting
Linux, helping to turn on burst without hangs...

Someone stated that these problems might go away when turning off
"sync negotiation" on the Adaptec - I do not know if this is possible
with the adaptec1542B too? But I guess so.

With CPU->PCI-Burst it yielded 95k xstones, so he considers it as not
too grave to do without. His only problem is that he would like to run
his Winner-1000 at 1152x900 which fails because it seems to take any
x-resolution higher than 1024pixels as a 1280pixel-resolution, thus
wasting a lot end resulting in a y-resolution of 816pixels... but this
is probably no PCI-related problem. It should have gone away with
XFree86-2.1

10.6. [email protected] / ASUS

o BOARD ASUS PCI/I-486 SP3 RAM: 16MB (4x4M-SIMM)

o CPU 486DX33 CPU

o BIOS Ver. 4.50 (12/30/93)

o Floppy Two floppy drives (1.2 and 1.44), using ASUS on-
board floppy controller

o SCSI tried both WD7000 SCSI controller and Adaptec 1542CF and
worked.

o Two SCSI 320M hard drives

o SCSI NEC84 CDROM drive

o SCSI QIC150 Archive tape drive

o Video - Tseng ET4000 ISA graphics card

o Sound PAS16 sound card

o Printer attached to on-board ASUS parallel port

He has nothing in the PCI-Slots yet, but wants to buy a PCI-Video-
Card, currently uses WD7000 SCSI controller but will switch to the
NCR-Chip onboard as soon as the driver is out.

Everything works perfectly - the first serial port which has a 14.4K-
Modem attached does hang occasionally when reconnecting with the modem
after having used it previously. He says that would not be unique to
ASUS but rather a bug in the SMC-LSI device with its 16550UART. The
logitech-serial-mouse on the second port works fine. Setting down the
threshold of the 16550 for the mouseport would definitely help, one
does seem to need a special patched setserial for that? I have not got
the information yet, please contact me if you know more!

10.7. [email protected] / GigaByte

o Board - GA-486iS from Gigabyte w/ 256Kb 2L-Cache, i486-DX2

o Bios - AMI, 93/8

o SCSI - no scsi-NCR-chip on-board, using Adaptec 1542C,

o Video - ELSA Winner 1000

o Linux 0.99pl14 + SCSI-Clustering-Patches / Slackware 1.1.1

All seems to go well, but he has not tried neither networking,
printing or a streamer yet. Before applying the clustering- patches he
had some problems with hangs triggered by "find", but this no longer
is the case - perhaps it was an older kernel-bug.

The ELSA-Winner-1000 sometimes hangs, with very strange patterns on
the screen resolved only by rebooting... The dealer has told him it
was a bug in the ELSA-Card, but the manufacturer claims it had solved
the problem. The bug is not reproducible so he does not plan to take
any action at the moment.

All in all the machine seems to work very well under heavy text
processing (emacs, LaTeX, xfig, ghostview) usage. Interaction is
surprisingly responsive, little difference between it and the 3-4X as
expensive Sun he works on...

CPU->PCI-Burst is still disabled because the bios does not support the
PCI-things well?

A problem with his new modem (v32 terbo) arose: it looses characters.
Especially when using SLIP it complains a lot about RX and TX errors.
As soon as he runs X it gets unusable. He said he activated FIFO and
RTS/CTS with stty, but to no avail...

10.8. Tom Drabenstott ([email protected]) with Comtrade / PCI48IX

PCI48IX Motherboard Rev. 1.0. Made by ??? documentation copyrighted by
"exrc". The BIOS says not very much about PCI.

His E-315E Super IDE UMC (863+865) ISA-Controller-card does have
problems. (It is a multifunction controller-card). It seems to work
well under DOS/OS2 but not under Linux.

11. General tips for PCI-Motherboard + Linux NCR PCI SCSI

This was compiled by Angelo Haritsis ([email protected]) from various
people's postings:

11.1. DON'Ts:

Do *NOT* go for combination VLB/PCI motherboards. They usually have a
lot of problems. Get a plain PCI version (with ISA slots as well of
course). A lot of bad things have been heard about OPTI chipset PCI
motherboards. Someone hints: "Avoid the OPTi (82C596/82C597/82C822)
chipset based motherboards like the TMC PCI54PV".

(I know of at least one person having no problems with his TMC PCI54PV
motherboard. He just had to put the NCR53c810 addonboard into slot-A
which is the only slot capable of busmastering as it seems.)

Rumours say that Intel chipset PCI motherboards will have problems
with more than one bus-mastering PCI board. I have not tried this one
yet on mine and have nothing to suggest. I also heard that the Saturn
II chipset is problematic, but this is the one I use and it is
perfectly ok! Advice: Try to negotiate a 1-2 week money back agreement
with your supplier, in case the motherboard you get has problems with
the use you plan for it.

11.2. SIMM slots

Go for 72-pin only SIMMs for speed: Some (all?) of the mainboards
which take 30 pin SIMMs use a 32 bit main memory interface, and will
be significantly slower than the Intel based boards which all use a 64
bit or permantly interleaved memory interface. You might want to keep
that in mind.

11.3. Praised PCI Pentium motherboard

The P90 Intel motherboard with the Intel Premiere II chipset (aka
Plato). Get the latest BIOS which has concatenated NCR scsi BIOS
3.04.00. Otherwise DOS won't see your scsi disk(s) if you use a BIOS-
less 53c810 based controller. NCR SCSI BIOS exists in the AMI BIOS of
the plato after version 1.00.08 (or maybe verion 1.00.06). This BIOS
is FLASH upgradeable so you should be able to get the upgrade on a
floppy from your supplier. The current version is 1.00.10 and has all
early problems fixed.

(Bios files should be available at ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/ibmpc/intel,
but I did not check that myself. the Autor.)

11.4. irq-lines

The value in the interrupt line PCI configuration register is usually
set manually (for compatability with legacy ISA boards) in the
extended CMOS setup screens on a per-slot or per-device basis. Older
PCI mainboards also force you to set jumpers for each PCI slot/device
which select how PCI INTA and perhaps INTB, INTC, and INTD are mapped
to an 8259 IRQ line, Obviously, if these jumpers exist on your board,
they must match the settings in the extended CMOS setup. Also note
that some boards (notably Viglens) have silkscreens and instruction
manuals which disagree with the wiring, and some experimentation may
be in order.

11.5. Info about the different NCR 8xx family scsi chips:

All NCR 8XX Chips are dircet connect PCI bus mastering devices, that
have no preformance difference wether on motherboard or add in option
card. All devices comply with PCI 2.0 Specification, and can burst 32
bit data at the full 33 MHz (133Mbytes/Sec)

11.5.1. 53C810

53C810 = 8 bit Fast SCSI-2 (10 MB/Sec) Single ended only Requires
Integrated Mother board BIOS 100 pin Quad Flat Pack (PQFP) Worlds
first PCI SCSI Chip, Volumes make it the most inexpensive.

11.5.2. 53C815

53C815 = 8 bit Fast SCSI-2 (10 MB/Sec) Single Ended only Support ROM
BIOS interface, which makes it ideal for add-in card Designs. 128 Pin
QFP

11.5.3. 53C825

53C825 = 8 bit Fast SCSI-2, Single ended or Differential 16 bit Fast
SCSI-2 (20 MB/Sec), Single ended or Differetial Also has support for
external Rom, making it a good candidate for add in cards. 160 pin QFP
Not supported by linux yet. (See section below on news about the 825).
Must have devices with wide or differential scsi to use these
features.

11.6. future of 53c8xx

There are 4 new devices planned for announcement late this year and
into early next year. Footprint compitible with 810 and 825 with some
new features.

All the Chips require a BIOS in DOS/Intel applications. The 810 is
the only chip that needs it resident on the motherboard. Latest NCR
SCSI BIOS version: 3.04.00 The bios supports disks >1GB for DOS.

11.7. Performance of the 53c810

C't magazine's DOS benchmarks showed that it was significantly faster
than the Buslogic BT-946, one user noted a 10-15% performance increase
versus an Adaptec 2940, and with a very fast disk it may be 2.5X as
fast as an Adaptec 1540.

12. news about NCR53c825 support

Drew Eckhardt stated this would indeed work with the driver included
into the newer Linux Kernels, but there would be two trivial changes
necessary:

Yes, although you have to remove the 3 from inside the brackets
for the pci_chip_ids[] array, and add an 825: to an obvious case
statement.

12.1. Pentium+NCR+Strap_bug Frederic POTTER (Fred-
[email protected]) about

On some Intel Plato board, the NCR bios doesn't recognize the board,
because it needs to see the board as a "secondary SCSI controller",
and because on most SCSI board the jumper to select between
primary/secondary has been ironed to primary (to spare 1 cent,
presumably).

Solution:

near the NCR chip, they are 3 via ( kind of holes ) with a strap like
that
O--O O

this mean primary is selected as default setting. For the Plato Intel
Mainboard, it should be like that

O O--O

The best solution is to get rid of the strap and to put a 2 position
jumper instead.

12.2. PCIprobe in the latest Linux Kernels by Frederic Potter

Frederic Potter has added a PCI-Probe into the latest kernels. If you
do a "cat /proc/pci" it should list all your cards. If you own cards
which are not properly recogniced, please contact him via mail as
"[email protected]".

See arch/i386/kernel/bios32.c and include/linux/pci.h in the kernel
source for more information on PCI-Probe-Stuff.

13. Conclusion

If you have some moneny to put into your machine, you'd be well off
with a Pentium90, ASUS-SP4, which is what I use at the moment. If you
can afford 32M RAM that would be much better than 16M RAM.

Real soon now the upcoming standard will be the Triton Chipset with
support for special SIMMS called EDODRAM, which has cache on the SIMM
and does not require any external cache anymore. At the time of
writing (29th of March 95) this is fairly new and will evolve a lot,
but you could expect more than a 30 percent increase in performance.
The PCI Mach64 ATI-GUP-Turbo (not the cheaper GUP-Turbo-Windows) would
be a good choice, with 4M RAM you can have truecolor in higher
resolutions. It is well supported in the XFree86(tm)-3.1.1, and there
are commercial X-Servers available of which I'd recommend
Accelerated/X by Roell, which supports the Mach64 very well and fast.
For SCSI I'd take the DPT rather than the (much cheaper and very fast)
NCR53c810 in case you plan to use SCSI-Tapes a lot. The NCR53c810
driver on Linux does lack disconnect/reconnect support, thus blocking
the SCSIbus on operations like "mt rewind", "mt fsf" etc. It bears a
performance penalty on tar-operations

If you do not want to spend that much money on computer equipment
(e.g.: you are having a life) you might go for an ASUS-SP3-SiS with
AMD-DX2/66 or DX4/100. The SPEA V7 Mirage P64 PCI with 2M VRAM would
be a good choice, since it uses the Trio64 S3 Chip, which is well
supported by XFree86(tm)-3.1.1, quite cheap to buy and fast, too.

Intel Premiere-II (aka Plato) motherboard, and the number-nine
GXE64Pro. Since I don't have that much money I'd opt for a 486 on the
new ASUS-486-PCI-SP3-G Board with the saturn-chipset rev. 4. and the
PCI-ATI-GUP Mach32 with 2M VRAM. I can use x-window in 16bpp or 8bpp
(64K colors or 256 colors) in accelerated mode that way. Since the
mach64 is not supported yet I would not recommend buying it for the
time being. The current linux-kernels seem to have some problems with
this ASUS-486-PCI-SP3-g board with PCI-to-Memory-posting enabled, but
the system is still very fast when disabling that feature. If you come
across a 486-board which works with all PCI-features enabled, please
let me know.

Another fine card since XFree86(tm)-3.1 is the fast and cheap
et4000/w32-PCI-card.

So whatever mainboard you buy, you should get one with the
NCR53c810-SCSI-chip on board. It is unbeatable in its price/speed.

14. Thanks

I want to thank the following people for supporting this document:

o David Lesher ([email protected]) for extensive help with the
english language

o Nathanael MAKAREVITCH ([email protected]) for translating into
french

o Jun Morimoto ([email protected]) for translating into
japanese

o Donald Becker ([email protected]) for ethernet-
informations

o Drew Eckhardt ([email protected]) for SCSI-informations

and many more peole adding information mostly by mail and by posts,
some of them will be named here:

[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] (Working at the PCI-NCR53c810-Driver),
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] (iX-Magazine),
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
Ulrich Teichert, Stormweg 24, D-24539 Neumuenster, Germany
[email protected],
[email protected]
[email protected],
[email protected],
Gert Doering ([email protected]),
James D. Levine ([email protected]),
Georg von Below ([email protected]),
Jerome Meyers ([email protected]),
Angelo Haritsis ([email protected]),
[email protected] and his friend [email protected].

15. copyright/legalese

(c)opyright 1993,94 by Michael Will - the GPL (Gnu Public License)
applies. If you cannot obtain a copy of the GPL I will be happy to
send you one.

If you sell this HOWTO on a CD or in a book I would really like to
have a copy for reference.

([email protected])

Contact me, either via eMail or call +49-7071-67551.

Trademarks are owned by their owners. There is no warranty on the
information in this document.

For german users I am offering tested, preinstalled / preconfigured
and supported Linux-PCI-machines. Call me at 07071-67551.