Adaptec 2940 controllers

[Glenn Burkhardt]

> From mdulcey at pryder.pn.com Tue Dec 16 13:36:30 1997
> Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 10:14:37 -0500 (EST)
> From: "Mark J. Dulcey" <mdulcey at pryder.pn.com>
> To: Glenn Burkhardt <glenn at aoi.ultranet.com>
> Cc: gaf at zk3.dec.com, discuss at BLU.ORG
> Subject: Re: Adaptec 2940 controllers
> 
> On Mon, 15 Dec 1997, Glenn Burkhardt wrote:
> 
> > > I recently tried to upgrade the former Boston Computer Society server from 
> > > an old version of Slackware. The system has a 2940w controller which is one 
> > > of the ones that the 2.0 kernels don't like.
> 
> > I wish you hadn't sent this, because now my computer is going know that it's
> > not supposed to work, although it's been running flawlessly with a 2940
> > controller for almost a year.
> 
> I have a 2940 (though not the W variety) working with Linux 2.0.31. The
> one catch I found is that I had to disable PCI peer concurrency in the
> BIOS setup; otherwise, there were erratic problems.

I would have to guess that the problems would have to do with BIOS handling of
the PCI bus.  I've seen several notes to the effect that early PCI based 
machines had buggy BIOS's, and, of course, the PCI standard was under 
development for many (recent) years.