> Hi,
>    My apologies for possibly sending this to the wrong mail lists (and please
> inform me of the proper channels;), but I had a question:
> 
> 	1)  Does NetBSD-current for i386 support Synchronous and Fast SCSI2
> 	    operations on the 1542CF?

I belive so.  These options are largely transparent to the driver, esp.
Fast SCSI.

> 	2)  Considering the problems in getting specs for the new PCI Adaptec
> 	    cards, does this mean that there is going to be no further
> 	    improvement on current EISA and ISA Adaptec drivers?

I expect so.  Given the availabilty of newer, higher performance stuff,
I expect that there is enough work there to keep people busy.  The only
major thing I can see people wanting to get done is the bounce buffer
support.

> 	3)  I've heard a lot of people recommend the BT cards.  Can someone
> 	    tell me more about this card (ie, capabilities, specs, cost, etc)
> 	    and whether they recommend it over the 1542CF?  Also, if someone
> 	    can point me to a distributor (I've not been able to locate the
> 	    cards).  I'm interested in ISA, EISA, and PCI information.

The VL bus BusLogic is the 445S.  The EISA one is the 747(#?), the PCI
one is the 946.  The VL/ISA/EISA ones are floppy and SCSI controller.  The
946 is SCSI only.  We have several systems with 946S here, combine them
with some Barracuda's and you get some happening I/O.  I'm planning on 
getting a 445S for my home system RSN.

> 	4)  Can someone tell me about the NCR chipset for PCI SCSI?  Does
> 	    BT use this set?

BusLogic (formerly BusTek) uses their own chipsets.  All of their controllers
are also 1542 compatible, and work fine (and quite a bit faster than the
1542) in compatibility mode.  NetBSD has prelimiary support for the 
NCR PCI chipset, including a PCI bus controller device that should make adding
other PCI support easier.

> 	5)  The ISA DMA overrun problem found on ISA machines with more
> 	    than 16 MB of RAM - does NetBSD handle this gracefully, or are
> 	    files written during this problem corrupted?

Cards that use the Motherboard DMA controller are okay (currently none, 
except the floppy drive I think) because that driver has bounce buffers.
None of the other ones do, although I may hack it for the 1542 driver sometime
soon.  Bounce buffers are what is used to fix the overrun problem.  If a
particular I/O is outside of 16M, the system allocates a secodary buffer,
and copies into it before I/O (on write) or after I/O (on read).

> Thanks for your help;)
> 
> Cheers,
> Jake
> jfk@seas.upenn.edu

BTW...if anyone points you at bounce buffer support for the 1542, let me
know.

-Mark