On Tue, Feb 16, 1999 at 04:26:12PM -0800, Paul Newhouse wrote:
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr> writes:
> 
> >Is there somebody out there that own an add-on PCI IDE card which supports
> >DMA/Ultra-DMA, and could run some tests for me ?
> >It would be nice if we didn't support DMA only for on-motherboard IDE
> >controllers for the next release ...
> 
> I've asked this before and don't remember receiving any response:
> 
>   What PCI IDE cards which support UDMA, and will likely work with Bouyers
>   code, exist?

None, unless they have a CMD 646U chip on them -- and the only ones of
those I'm aware of are the CMD sample boards.  Every chip requires its
registers to be set up a little differently, so new code has to be
written to initialize each one.

> I have some Promise Tech cards and am having a swell time trying to get them 
> to work.  I'd be willing to buy a couple of cards that are supposed to work 
> with Manuel's code (assuming the price isn't to outrageous) and be very willing 

The Promise cards you have are the most likely to work, since there's
documentation for them and support in the FreeBSD driver.  If you get
in touch with Manuel directly he can probably send you a patch.

> to test the code.  BUT, I have not been able to find any addon PCI IDE cards 
> (other than the Promise Techs).

There's also a card made by SIIG, but I *don't* recommend it -- the part
on it is very strange and may not actually be a normal pciide at all.

> If can ever get my test machine backon line (have just determined the 4th
> ASUS P5A is broken) I'll have an full time test machine available for this.

Ooh -- I have one in a Windows box, but I *don't* particularly like the
P5A motherboards.  The design is fine, and the 5 PCI slots are nice, but
the chipset... that Acer Labs chipset is kinda sleazy.  For one thing,
it claims to support ECC memory, but it turns out that that Just Doesn't
Work if you run the memory clock past 83MHz.  Since most people buy those
boards to run with "Super 7" CPUs at 100MHz, the ECC support is more or
less a lie.  If you don't need the extra PCI slot or the onboard sound,
try the FIC VA-503+.  It uses the VIA MVP3 chipset, has 1MB (as opposed
to the ASUS board's 512K) of cache, and generally seems to be very solid
(I have several).

Thor