Toru Nishimura wrote:

> >>  0: PMTNV-AA DEC      V1.1     TCF0  (1 MB NVRAM )
> >
> > The "1 MB NVRAM" sorta gives it away, but a quick AltaVista search
> > proves that it's a TurboChannel PrestoServe card.  Ultrix doesn't
> > support it, but it seems that Dec UNIX does.
> >
> > If you can get this working _with_ the ffs soft update code, we'll have
> > fast safe synchronous writes :-)
> 
> ULTRIX could run TURBOchannel PrestoServ option cards.  Our site once
> had 4 complete sets of DECsystem 5900 in 2 cabinet enclosure, and they
> were in operation with PrestoServ enabled.  PrestoServ driver
> intercepts any of (including even RAID) disk operations using hooks in
> bdevsw[], and pretends to achieve very quick I/Os in crash proof
> fashion.  NFS synchronous write nature was eventually improved with
> it.

I couldn't find any reference to "PMTNV" or "PMAP-AA" in the known
TurboChannel card list on Ultrix 4.5 - maybe older versions of Ultrix
recognise the card, or you need an extra driver to add to the stock
Ultrix kernel.  We certainly do use PrestoServe memory cards in our
5000/2xx, 5900, 5500 and 5100 machines, both to improve the performance
of NFS writes (greatly) and Oracle (small but measurable).

Simon.