Re: Anybody in for helping a new debian user with aic7xxx ?
On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, Dieter Rohlfing wrote:
> Tim Sailer wrote:
>
> > Do you have an early 2940 in the machine? I had this same problem,
> > and had to get a BIOS upgrade from Adaptek.
>
> It's revision B with BIOS 1.21
>
> > The 2940 and it's chipset are considered beta, at best. I have a
> > production system with a 4 month old 2940 in it that runs with no
> > problem. Ny system at home, OTOH, has an 18 month old 2940, and it
> > panics about every 2 weeks. This is a problem with the driver, not
> > the distribution.
>
> That doesn't explain, why Caldera et.al don't have the problems debian
> has. And what about the 2842? Beta, too? Both controller use the same
> chip, one is VLB, the other PCI. That's all.
for the record, i've built at least half a dozen debian systems with
adaptec 2940 scsi controllers. with no problems. most of these are
running linux 2.0.29 or 2.0.30. Installing them was straight-forward,
just boot off the boot/rescue floppy and follow the menus.
one of these machines is a squid cache with 192MB RAM and 10GB of scsi
disk. Running linux 2.0.30. Except for a simm failure (which took some
time to diagnose correctly), this machine performs flawlessly. it gets
about 320000 requests per day, most of those between 8.30am and 4pm,
with a huge peak around midday.
i have never bothered downloading any of the newer aic7xxx drivers because
the standard driver included with the released kernels has always worked
well enough for me: "if it works, don't fix it."
The AHA 2940 is my preferred scsi controller for linux systems, followed
closely by the NCR 53c810 which performs almosts as well (most people
don't have or need ultra-wide scsi) at a quarter of the price (under
$A100 for the NCR versus up to $A400 or more for the adaptec depending
upon supplier).
BTW, you mention VLB. I wouldn't trust VLB for anything, for any
reason. I am so glad that VLB is finally dead now that PCI is
commonplace....VLB has got to be the flakiest, crappiest "standard" that
ever became popular.
craig
--
craig sanders
networking consultant Available for casual or contract
temporary autonomous zone system administration tasks.
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: