Henry B. Hotz wrote:
> 
> At 1:30 PM 10/2/97, Colin Wood wrote:
> >Cool!  Fastest '040 Mac made...I wish I had one ;-)
> 
> Actually I think the 950 is faster, and can be upgraded to have two DMA
> SCSI chains as well.  The people on the A/UX newsgroup claim that it was
> faster as a real server than many newer, higher-priced machines for many
> years.  I'm not sure if A/UX was ever ported to the AV Quadra's.  Of course
> neither A/UX, nor MacBSD will ever take advantage of the DSP chip (I don't
> think).

I don't know about the 2 DMA SCSI chains, but the standard Q840AV has a
40MHz '040, whilst the Q950 is only 33MHz.  As for the DSP chip, well, you
never know.  If someone has the will and the time, I think that anything
can be supported.  If you'd asked me 5 years ago whether or not some
variety of Un*x created independently of Apple would ever run on my Mac
(with color X to boot), I'd have probably doubted it, too.

> >
> >> My standard booting OS is 7.1, but this machine is too new to be supported.
> 
> >From what I've heard here, 7.6.1 should be snappy enough (supposedly
> >faster than 7.5.5) especially on an 840AV, and probably stable enough as
> >well.
> 
> Is that what you use?

I have a IIci right at the moment (my new Q700 seems to be lost in the
mail )-: so when I'm using NetBSD I usually run 7.1.  If I'm using MacOS,
then I use 7.5.5.  I have a copy of 7.6, but I haven't installed it quite
yet (I need to clear out some disk space first), but people on the list
have noted that it seems to be faster than 7.5.5.

> >
> >> Since there has been a lot of work on the newer Mac's since 1.2.1 I expect
> >
> >Since 1.2.1 probably won't even boot with an NFS disk and a serial console
> >on that machine, you'll have to go with -current.
> 
> Oh, is it *that* bad?  How quickly we forget.

Yeah, remember a lot of support for the '040 processor didn't get
implemented until last September?  and SCSI support didn't come until
something like last October or November I think...

> >
> >The AV Quadra's were the only 68k-based Macs with true DMA (although I
> >think that the IIfx had something DMA-ish).  This is not supported yet,
> >tho :-(
> 
> I thought the fx had DMA, but someone corrected me on the list, saying that
> data is copied to IOP memory and the IOP does programed IO.
> 
> Thanks for the feedback.

You're welcome!  Good luck and have fun.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.