Hi,

Horacio wrote:
> I_ve got this machine which I_m not sure if it has a microchannel
> bus.  I looked through IBM_s only to find that some 310_s have
> PCI/ISA and others PCI/MCA, but I wouldn_t recognize MCA even if
> it were red and flashy.
> 
> The machine has 2 pci slots and another 2 which to me look like
> isa slots, and then 1 other which is slightly longer than the isa
> slots.  It also has a scsi card, aha-2940s71, with 2x1GB ibm hds
> and a cdrom attached to it.

Those may be MCA slots.

The MCA slots seem to be of two variants, similar to e.g. 8bit vs.
16bit ISA slots.

The ports I have in my model 70 PS/2 machine are 9cm and 13cm (~3.6
inch and ~5.2 inch) long, with about 3.5 cm (~1.4 inch)
gap between the side of mb and start of slot.

> this may be an MCA machine? If so, which boot image should I be
> using then? If not, any idea as to why it freezes?

It may be just flaky floppy disk. Try to dd the image again,
or try other floppy.

> p.s.  all the INSTALL file says is that "MCA devices are supported by
> MCA-enabled kernel, such as one compiled from the PS2
> configuration file" ... ???

Yeah, generally, MCA PS/2 machines need a special kernel configuration
right now. The minimal kernel with supported MCA stuff is the 'PS2' one -
if you even compiled a kernel yourself, you should find the config file
under sys/arch/i386/conf/PS2.

Now, I've never encountered an MCA machine with PCI bus yet, so there
is no support for that in tree yet. Maybe I'd be able to look if it'd
be possible to cook some patches, though I'm not quite sure
how easy the support would be. Would you be willing to test patches?

Jaromir
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~dolecek/
 ***  Wanna a real operating system ? Go and get NetBSD, dammit!  ***