TI chipset PCI card resolution.

[David L. Vrablic]

Question: are any of the TI chipset cards ok to use with STAR-OS?

This subject keeps popping up and to tell the truth I would like to know the answer myself
It seems that some version or another is showing up on the surplus market for a very good price.
---------------------------------------.
SO! I am willing to send 1 of each of the 3 PCI cards to someone who has "more bandwidth than I" :)

(Meaning ,someone smarter and more respected on the forum than I . When you get older you can admitt these things )

Would someone please offer to beat the heck out of them and give us some feed back.?

Whatever the results you may keep the cards!

Anyone want to help?

[georgew]

The P111's are a Ti chipset card...

I'm in the process of setting up a DSLreports site, and a have piles of equipment to test with... I could do some benchmarks for you. I don't know if I can measure the impact on the OS with any reliability, but I can put them through some long transfers and bang on them a while and report back the results.

The radios are probably slower than the pcmcia cards, so I would only expect slight differences... but as a scientist you are supposed to make a guess and see if you can prove it right or wrong, so my guess is they are close to the same... but it would not suprise me if there were slight differences in performance. I will also test them with high-power cards and verify they deliver enough power to hqandle the high-power cards... This actually may be a larger concern for several people. To this end I'll also try to measure the supply voltage to the card under load, as this will tell part of the story as well...

[David L. Vrablic]

OK George ,

Sounds like a direction we can live with.

You are on.
Give me an address to send them to and "Let the games begin"

[bobbyc]

We have 7 towers each with 3 or 4 of these orinoco (TI chipset cards.)
Over the past 1.5 years I've had lockup problems with all but 1 tower.
Most recently I had a tower with a dual Ricoh adapter and 2 orinoco adapters. It would still lock up on a weekly basis. Last time I was at the tower (3 weeks ago) I put all Ricoh adapters in there.
Just yesterday another tower locked up. I put all Ricoh adapters in it yesterday.
I've been blaming everything from starOS to the prism firmware (1.7.4), but now I feel it is these orinoco cards. We've had timeout problems with them in freeBSD machines too.
I just ordered a bunch of the Ricoh adapters from Valemount last weekend during you snooze you lose promotion, and now I have to go swap out all our towers late at night this week :)
There is a option in star-OS under advanced>pcmcia irq options to choose (may help some actiontec PC750 adapters) Does anyone konw if this will help these TI adapters in question?
Bob C

[bobbyc]

I think this thead jinxed me :)
In the above thread I mentioned that I swapped out orinoco adapters 3 weeks ago in a tower for all Ricoh adapters. Well, that tower just locked up on me yesterday afternoon. I could associate to the radio cards, and the backhaul was still showing signal readings (on the other tower end), but there was no TCP/IP activity, so I couldn't SSH in. (strr1.12.2)
The setup is a ASUS TUSL2-C celeron cpu, 128mb ram, Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX NIC, no VGA card, and a standard hard drive. Everything in the bios is turned off (parallel ports, serial ports, usb, etc). The card order (slot 1-6) was Ricoh, NIC, blank, Dual Ricoh (with only 1 slot used), blank, Ricoh.
The only thing I noticed is that my single Ricoh adapters were a different style board than what valemount sells. I got them from demarctech a while back.
Anyways I put in all valemount single Ricoh adapters and we'll see what happens.
Do you think this might be the cause? Next time it locks up, I have a new VIA733 waiting in the wings complete with different MB, processor, ram, HD, and NIC. Only thing I'd be using that would be the same is the power supply; but that is on conditioning currently so I doubt thats the problem.
The hermes radio cards are the same, do you think that might be locking up the cpu? They are all still working when these computers lock up so I'm not sure.
The only IRQ being shared via the system information is 12: 593834 XT-PIC i82365, agere_cs, PS/2 Mouse

Bob C

[lonnie]

Quite a few motherboards will still generate IRQ 7 (bogus) even when disabled in the BIOS. I recommend to shut off everything BUT the parallel port.

[georgew]

Yeah, I've seen boards where unused interrupts generate spurious signals... But that can happen in lots of places if the design is poor. The problem is all of the electronics we use are consumer-grade crap... nothing we can do about it...

Bobby, have you checked heat out as a possible problem? I don't know where you are, or when your crashes happen, but heat is a big factor. In a sealed box I was able to generate enough heat to crash with an ambient of 85 or so, so just because the weather is mild doesn't dismiss the possibility of too much head mucking up the works.

As for your power supply, I've seen whole batches of new pc power supplies that put out 4 and 10 volts instead of 5 and 12... It can still be the power supply, especially since it is a common part. Anything common between the crashing systems is suspect, including power. In my computer repair days, every repair started with looking at the power supply with a meter and a scope.

[bobbyc]

Man thanks for the suggestions guys; only time will tell when I can confirm if it is the IRQ 7 thingy locking these things up.... That and the orinoco (TI) chipset is the only thing consistent among these cpu's locking up.
Ping watchdogs don't help in these lockup situations because it is starOS locking up, not the firmware on the cards :(
I know on all our towers we like to disable everything but what's necessary in the BIOS.... so maybe I need to go to every tower late at night and bring along a vga card and monitor/keyboard so I can make some BIOS settings.
I'm still going to swap out my TI chipset cards to Ricoh since they are fully supported by starOS :)
So I'll probably be re-visiting this thread in 2 months with an update... and then going around and editing my posts where I blame the TI chipset cards for all our problems.
They are still a huge problem in freeBSD machines though; we've tested them in all kinds of MB's and alot of the cards get timeouts.
Bob C

[bobbyc]

George,
all our CPU's are in rackmounts with lots of fans and are housed in communication sheds with Air conditioning... but 1 tower. This one tower has huge fans and excellent circulation (now.)
The power supplies are all different brands throughout our towers.
Regarding the 1 outdoor enclosure tower that crashed Jul 29th; it was a VIA733 from starOS with 1.11.12 router desktop with 2 ti chipset adapters and 1 dual ricoh adapter. But everything was disabled in the BIOS so maybe this IRQ 7 thingy has some merit.
Maybe I should just set everything in the BIOS to default, except for only having a Primary IDE and booting only from DOM
Bob C

[lonnie]

If you set to default you will get USB enabled and that gives you a reboot problem with Linux. I would recommend shutting off everything but the parallel port.

[georgew]

Yeah, well I know it was an obvious thing... not knowing your set-up I had to toss it in...

I have yet to have a lockup... the only software problems I've seen were bugs that got fixed... You are obviously exercising code that I don't use...

I think there is an echo in here....


haloooooOOoo OOoo OOoo.........