I’ve got several systems I need to put together with existing
hardware. Unfortunately, that hardware consists of Celeron-333MHz
PCs with 10gig HDs, and the OS is QNX v2.21. I’ve talked
to a company who runs process controls with 2.21 on 233MHz
machines, but I’m having no luck. The machine essentially
starts up, the 2.21 system floppy reads for several seconds,
then stops. I get echo from the keyboard, but no messages
from QNX, and nothing else. I thought that maybe PCI video was
a problem, perhaps I should get an ISA card. I’ve slowed the
bus speed down to 66Mhz, and the CPU to 200Mhz. Any suggestions
from anyone familiar with this version of QNX?
Thanks,
Matt Scruby
Calera Systems
I have a 333Mhz PII Laptop which runs QNX2.
In order to load it, I had to disable both the
L1 and L2 caches. This makes it run about the
speed of an 8088. If you have a network with
Corman cards, you might be able to boot
over the network and load that way.
The 10gig HD might be a problem. I wrote the
disk.ata driver that supports LBA mode, but I
think that there might be some problems that
occur when you hit 8gig. At the very least,
QNX2 will probably not have access beyond
8gig.
Mort Service <questionbox@re-media.com> wrote:
I’ve got several systems I need to put together with existing
hardware. Unfortunately, that hardware consists of Celeron-333MHz
PCs with 10gig HDs, and the OS is QNX v2.21. I’ve talked
to a company who runs process controls with 2.21 on 233MHz
machines, but I’m having no luck. The machine essentially
starts up, the 2.21 system floppy reads for several seconds,
then stops. I get echo from the keyboard, but no messages
from QNX, and nothing else. I thought that maybe PCI video was
a problem, perhaps I should get an ISA card. I’ve slowed the
bus speed down to 66Mhz, and the CPU to 200Mhz. Any suggestions
from anyone familiar with this version of QNX?
Thanks,
Matt Scruby
Calera Systems
–
Mitchell Schoenbrun --------- maschoen@pobox.com
Mort Service <questionbox@re-media.com> wrote:
I’ve got several systems I need to put together with existing
hardware. Unfortunately, that hardware consists of Celeron-333MHz
PCs with 10gig HDs, and the OS is QNX v2.21. I’ve talked
to a company who runs process controls with 2.21 on 233MHz
machines, but I’m having no luck. The machine essentially
starts up, the 2.21 system floppy reads for several seconds,
then stops. I get echo from the keyboard, but no messages
from QNX, and nothing else. I thought that maybe PCI video was
a problem, perhaps I should get an ISA card. I’ve slowed the
bus speed down to 66Mhz, and the CPU to 200Mhz. Any suggestions
from anyone familiar with this version of QNX?
Swapping video cards probably won’t make a difference as it is probably
failing in the timing loops for floppy access.
Can you disable any of the CPU caches to slow things down further?
Do you have any (old) machines around on which you can boot QNX2?
If so, you might be able to move the hard drive to one of these
machines, install there, then move it back and boot from it. BUT,
you are likely to hit a “missing OS” error if you do this – you
have to make sure both machines map the (large) IDE hard drive the
same way. Do you have disk.ata – this was written by, I think,
Mitchell Schoenbrun and handles lba disks, but it probably doesn’t
handle anything beyond the 8G mark (which was the next break point
for IDE drive mappings after the 540M point). So, you may have to
explicitly map your drive as if it only had 8G, and give up on ever
using those extra 2G. (Likely not an issue for a QNX2 system.)
Whatever you do, I wouldn’t even dream of trying to share this
machine with another OS.
-David
Thanks very much, that was the ticket. In fact, I was able
to get by turning off the internal cache only, kept
the external. I’m working on the drive geomoetry at this
point that will give me 8 gigs. I really don’t care much
about drive capacity, since a year’s worth of data storage
on this system will use only about 400Mb.
This may all be moot when I start to load the Opto drivers,
which have never been pushed beyond 166Mhz. In any case,
these guys are going to have the world’s fastest 15-year-old
process controller and data storage system.
On Tue, 29 Aug 2000 01:35:52 GMT, Mitchell Schoenbrun
<maschoen@tsoft.com> wrote:
I have a 333Mhz PII Laptop which runs QNX2.
In order to load it, I had to disable both the
L1 and L2 caches. This makes it run about the
speed of an 8088. If you have a network with
Corman cards, you might be able to boot
over the network and load that way.
The 10gig HD might be a problem. I wrote the
disk.ata driver that supports LBA mode, but I
think that there might be some problems that
occur when you hit 8gig. At the very least,
QNX2 will probably not have access beyond
8gig.