Thanks to
Dr.Thomas P.Blinn, Gregers Nakman, Dr.T.Leitner.
The answer is NO, this combination tru64 V5.1A, AlphaStation 200 4/166 and
3Dlabs oxygen VX1
is not supported .
The definitive answer came from the ultimate authority on that list Dr.
Thomas Blinn.
Not the answer I wanted - but expected to hear, so I'll try to find a newer
machine.
Best Regards
Klaus Schneider
Orgiginal message from Dr. Thomas P. Blinn:
Point 1: That card is NOT supported in that system. No one ever did
any work to make sure it works in that system. So you may not be able
to get the card to work in that system, no matter what you do. And I
doubt anyone at Compaq is going to try to make the card work, because
that system is no longer marketed (or even really supported, it's OLD
and there are very few of them still in use inside Compaq), and even
if anyone was willing to try, you aren't paying for support (since you
have the non-commericial package), so there's little incentive to try.
That said, I can tell you that the error you are seeing, a panic early
in the initialization, appears to be in the platform code, that is, it
is an "apecs_read_io_port" panic. This happens in very low level code
in the kernel that is supposed to go out through the "core logic" (the
chips that interface the CPU to the memory and PCI I/O bus) and read a
value from I/O, device memory, or device registers. The code accepts
a "handle" that describes what the caller wants read, and either gives
back a 64-bit long value with the data, or panics the system. There
are at least 5 different panic cases, and each gives the identical
panic string ("apecs_read_io_port"), but each first attempts to do a
printf() of a more detailed string explaining exactly what is wrong.
Unfortunately, those strings are not being displayed and since you
are not getting a crash dump (I suspect), you can't just look in the
crash data file to find them. In other words, this would be a BITCH
to debug (not impossible, but remarkably difficult).
I suspect there is a problem in the interaction between the driver for
the 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 PCI graphics card and the platform support code
for your archaic AlphaStation 200 system. Referring back to point 1,
since the combination is NOT SUPPORTED BY COMPAQ, that is, not sold as
a combination, especially since you bought the graphics card elsewhere,
you have no recourse. Sorry.
Tom
Received on Tue Mar 05 2002 - 09:09:36 NZDT