On Thu, Mar 25, 1999 at 06:02:39PM -0400, David Maxwell wrote:
> 
> > Lots of people saying LFS + JFS stuff...
> 
> This isn't a direct reply, but along these lines, has anyone ever seen
> a non-volatile RAM PCI card that a driver could create a buffer in to
> survive system restarts? Seems like a simple enough idea that there
> would be one out there already...

Yeah, I have.  NetApp uses them.

I don't know who makes them, but most NetApp hardware is pretty stock so
I expect they do in fact buy them from somebody else.  I'd love to know
who, but I can't tear apart any of the NetApps I have access to for long
enough to be able to make a more educated guess.

I'm kinda curious about the NetApp SCSI interface cards, too.  I have access
to a few spare multichannel Ultra/Wide ones (I could probably glom onto a
FiberChannel one, too, but not for very long) and they *look* like standard
Qlogic cards, very, very similar to the DEC multichannel boards, but with
the DEC PCI-PCI bridge replaced with an IBM part.

However, inserting one in an x86 machine yields a hang on boot every time
I've tried it.  It could be some oddity of the IBM bridge and the BIOS not
knowing how to configure it, but I'd think modern x86 BIOSes could cope...
to me it looks like the cards are *deliberately* weird somehow, more likely
to keep people from putting standard PCI cards into their NetApps than to
make the NetApp cards useless in PCs.

Anyone know?

Thor