Hi,

I can't comment on the PCI-bridge issue, but there was certainly a problem
with the AIC7850 (2940-ish) controller and the NetBSD aic7xxx driver.
Fortunately, Justin Gibbs (author of the aic7xxx driver) has just made
it work for the 7850, so I have high hopes that my IWILL-P54TS motherboard
based system will soon be running a version of BSD.  That will probably be
FreeBSD at first, because that's where the new driver will probably show up
first.  I'll let you know how I get on.  (The 2940 controller cards actually
have an AIC7870 controller, which has 16 SCBs.  The 7850 only has 4, aparently.
As soon as I'm running, I'll post some benchmarks, to see how that affects
performance.  Since this is a personal workstation, I don't really need
killer NNTP server level performance.  I can say, though, that even under
windows the disk performance feels better than I remember the Sun boxes at Uni
having...(without numbers though, this impression is completely meaningless)

>I saw some discussion a couple weeks ago about problems someone was
>having with a 2940-ish SCSI controller that was integrated on a Pentium
>motherboard (I believe the problem was that it used a PCI-PCI bridge,
>but don't remember for sure). Was this problem ever resolved? Has anyone
>had successful experiences with these boards? If so, could you provide
>details about models and suppliers? Also, what about integrated
>fast-wide SCSI.

The IWILL mob (Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers) also do versions called
P54TSW and P54TSW2 that have the relevant AIC- SCSI-Wide and Ultra controllers
on them.  Can't comment on how well they work, though.

Good luck,

Andrew.