[Coco] OT: NetBSD on Quadra 700???

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 28 September 2005 02:42, Kevin Diggs wrote:
>Gene Heskett wrote:
>> First, I wasn't aware of any 50 mhz 040 being available.  My own
>> 25mhz always told me rather quickly when the cpu fan had stopped.
>
>There is a fan on top of the heat sink so I have no idea what the
speed
>of the chip is. Should I check?

Only if you have a tube of arctic silver so you can clean the bottom
of the sink and the top of the chip and recoat them with fresh grease
like arctic silver, the best heat sink compound around.  Even Circuit
City is selling it these days.

>> Second, I'd imagine the memory is way too slow if the clock is
>> doubled, you would need 35ns ram instead of the 80-100 thats
probably
>> in it now.  I had to go down to 70ns on my PP&S card before it was
>> stable, and then it was *very* stable, often up 24/7 for 2 to 3
weeks
>> straight being used for everything I did at the time.  And this
>> sounds like a slow memory problem to me.
>
>I seriously doubt they doubled the speed of the memory bus. It would
>result in way to many failures and dissatisfied customers. The clock
on
>the motherboard is still the same as before. This thing just plugs
into
>the cpu socket.

I wonder if it has an extra mmu, and a local cache of faster ram?

>Wouldn't slow memory cause problems elsewhere? And why only with the
>gcse (global common sub-expression elimination) optimization?

Thats an option to your compiler?  I haven't had enough caffeine to
hazard a guess otherwise.

> I would
>have also expected both segfaults and/or compilation failures caused
>by garbled output from various passes.
>
>> What type of ram is in it?  Simms. dips, zips?  My PP&S card had
>> 64megs of zips on it, lotsa money at the time for 70ns stuff.
>
>They are 16M 30 pin simms. I'm not saying it isn't a memory problem.
But
>  I've never seen one so specific.

How fast are they?  Usually the number beyond the dash in the part
number on them is a clue.

>What's a PP&S?

Practical Pheripherals & Somethingorother, probably Software since
they wrote their own drivers for most of the cards they made.

They made accessory cards for lots of machines back in the late
80's-early 90's.  And the machine I'm refering to was an amiga 2000. 
I still have it, but the 30GB hard drive died, taking with it a very
lengthy, hard to re-invent, startup-sequence that made it workable
when trying to boot with only 4 megs of ram external to the
accellerator card and so much extra hardware.  ISTR the boot was
actually about 4 soft reboots before it was completed.  Late mounts of
everything that wasn't required to boot it because every mount point
took a hundred k of ram, yada yada.

For memory testing, we had a utility that allowed the cycle time to
be adjusted in 10ns increments, so one could determine how fast the
memory could actually run and be error free.

Some day, when I have nothing else to do for a month, I might try
installing debian on it.

>					kevin

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.