QNX2 questions CPU speed and PCI multiport serial cards

I’d always thought that a P-166 was about the fastest CPU QNX 2 would run on - based on whether or not a boot floppy would get to a login prompt. Well, since I played around with the disk.ata drivers I have had QNX running on a 2.4GHz machine for several days running a busywork test loop. I had no problems with the printer (vital), nor with the serial ports (I pushed a few hunderd megs of data back and forth using qcp), but the floppy drive was useless (not a big loss - this experiment came out of using CF cards for a backup medium to replace floppies)

So, does anyone know if there are any landmines involved before I tell my customers they can upgrade their old 486 - P166 machines to some nice 2+GHz Celerons?

And that leads into the second question. Are there any jumper configurable multiport cards? I have a couple of customers using the old ISA bus 4 port Digiboards. I’m playing with a 6 port PCI card, but it is software configured. My test machine’s BIOS shows it at IRQ11, and I can run a DOS utility to assign port addresses, but so far I have had no luck getting QNX to see it. Yes I have used intcp and inton as well as setting up the addresses from the DOS utility in osconfig. I suspect that this card needs to be “configured” every time the system is booted, so does anyone have suggestions on any “dumb” cards that can have their IRQ and addresses set via jumpers?

Hi.

Contact Connect Tech Inc and ask them about their Intellicon 4 and Flex-8 options. These are ISA 4 and 8 port boards. The Intellicon 4 comes either as 4xRS232 or 2xRS232 + 2xRS422/485

The flex 8 needs to be ordered with sim-like inserts which configure the port assignment. I have used both boards (hundreds of Intellicon-4 boards actually), both are still available and are jumper-configurable.

I have also used Moxa serial cards which are flash programmed using a DOS bootable floppy but are just as configurable and also work with QNX 2.

Something in return - could we please arrange an email discussion as I am interested in how you have got QNX2 working on Celerons. My email address should be visible if you click on my username.

Thanks,

Martin

I had QNX2 running on a AMD3200 inside VMWare 5, serial port seems to be resonding and the floppy is working fine (which was suprising because it doesn’t work in QNX4).

So, does anyone know if there are any landmines involved before I tell > my customers they can upgrade their old 486 - P166 machines to >some nice 2+GHz Celerons?

As you have already found, the biggest problem is loading from floppies.
If your bios will let you slow down the processor for this function, QNX 2 will run fine, except for the lack of a floppy.

There is one other well known problem. If you are using the network with QNET cards, there is a race condition that can leave a vitual circuit half open after it has been destroyed. This is not by itself a problem, but after running for a while you lose all of this resource. Periodic rebooting might help. At one time QNX posted a utility that was supposed to clean up the problem by finding and cleaning up these circuits. When I tried to run it, I could not get it to work. Finally, there is an application dependent solution. If you can arrange things so that you never close vitual circuits, the problem goes away.

This problem started appearing on 486x cpu computers.