I am currently running qnx rtp 6.1.0 on a msi 5169 motherboard/k63d350 and
am considering upgrading to 1gig ddr athlon/elitegroup k7ama motherboard.
This uses the Ali Magic 1645 & Magic 1535D+ chipset, and RealTek 8139C LAN
onboard. Are these supported by QNX or are there any issues anyone is aware
of concerning this?
All advice/info appreciated
AdM
I have not personally tested the Ali Magik Athlon chipset under QNX,
however, based on past experiences with Ali chipsets in general and
the poor performance of their DDR solution in general, I would avoid
this motherboard. Generally speaking, the memory subsystem of the
Ali chipset is not all that good. If you go and take a look at some of
the comparisons posted on the web, even most SDR based Via KT133A
solutions end up beating it. Personally? If you want a DDR based board
NOW go get one based on the AMD760 chipset. If you just want one
of the better debugged Athlon chipsets and don’t mind SDR, get a KT133A
based board. If you don’t mind waiting a bit, check out the new stepping
of the Via KT266 DDR chipset – probably to be called the KT266 “enhanced”.
The current 1st generation crop of KT266 boards is, well, crap. Avoid them.
I know for a fact that RTP works quite nicely on the KT133 series and would
assume it probably will on the new KT266 boards. The one caveat is that
QNX support for non-Intel IDE controllers in bus-master mode has always
been a bit, uhm, lacking. So don’t expect blazing IDE performance.
As far as the RealTek 8139C LAN chip goes, QNX does support it.
I have one in my machine and it seems to work fairly well. Though
perhaps I should elaborate a bit: for most tcpip based transactions
(cifs, http, ftp) the card seems to work perfectly and I have had zero
problems with it. I use it every day and it works flawlessly. On the
other hand, with Qnet the story is a bit different. When transferring
a large amount of data or when there is a lot of network traffic (i.e.
collisions) Qnet will lock up and all transactions will stop. And
the annoying thing is that it seems in some way related to the
RealTek network chip. We can swap out the NIC for another
3Com 3C905TX and the problem miraculously disappears. When
we drop in a Realtek card (8139B or 8139C, two different vendors)
the problem shows right back up.
Personally, I think their may be a bit of an issue with Qnet not
recovering that well when collisions occur on a network. And
I would guess that the way collisions are handled between the
RTL driver and the 3Com driver differs in some way.
I like the RealTek boards for the money and they work fine with
Windows and, most of the time, with QNX. If your goal in life
is to use Qnet a lot, I’d get a 3Com NIC.
Michael Burkey
(mailto:Michael.Burkey@Nexwarecorp.com)
Nexware Corp. (http://www.nexwarecorp.com)
Software Engineer
865.546.9998 x201
“Adam Martin” <amartin@musicchoice.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9hv48j$ov$1@inn.qnx.com…
I am currently running qnx rtp 6.1.0 on a msi 5169 motherboard/k63d350 and
am considering upgrading to 1gig ddr athlon/elitegroup k7ama motherboard.
This uses the Ali Magic 1645 & Magic 1535D+ chipset, and RealTek 8139C LAN
onboard. Are these supported by QNX or are there any issues anyone is
aware
of concerning this?All advice/info appreciated
AdM