[TUHS] flaky webster or sigma WQESD4 and RQD11 controllers on KA650???

[norman@nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)]

If you can read this, the 4-port Wombat (Webster/Sigma ESDI controller)
in the KA650 system through which this mail must pass on its way out
is working fine, as it has since I installed it in that system a year
and a half ago.

According to my notes, I had no trouble communicating with the onboard
diagnostic monitor (with the board in another KA650 reserved for system
testing).  I used the monitor quite a bit, starting it many times,
first because it took me a long time to realize that the terminator
had been left installed backwards in one of the drives (so the drive
wasn't visible to the controller no matter what I did to the cables).
I don't think I tried the serial port on the back of the Wombat board;
instead I uttered the magic commands to load and run the Wombat communication
program on the VAX itself.  I'd expect this to be more timing-sensitive
than the hardware port.  In any case it worked fine.

Once the controller could see the disks (and I'd done some formatting
and some testing with the diagnostics), I tested the Wombat under my
oddball version of UNIX, and found what may be an MSCP implementation
botch.  A UNIBUS/QBUS MSCP storage port gets only one interrupt vector;
it is supposed to set one of two flags to indicate whether it is interrupting
because there were no command slots and it freed one, or because there
were no messages waiting to be read and it supplied one.  The Wombat
appeared often to be tardy in setting the `message waiting' flag; my
port driver often received an interrupt, checked the flags, found nothing
to do, and of course dismissed the interrupt without realizing that
the controller had in fact reported an I/O completion.  (And of course
if I halted the system and took a crash dump I found the flag set.
It took some real-time tracing to uncover the problem.)

It is easy to work around this--instead of relying on the flag, one
can go look at the message descriptors to see if there's a new message--
so that is what my driver now does.  I have a vague memory that the
original Ultrix MSCP driver, whence the current BSD one is probably
descended and the current Ultrix one more distantly, already did it
that way.  Silly me, I programmed from the protocol spec rather than
just blindly copying someone else's unexplained code ...

None of this explains why Bob Keys is having trouble, but it does
suggest to me that the Wombat firmware might have other subtle bugs
that are tickled by particular systems, perhaps even timing-dependent
problems.  (I haven't checked, but it could well be that the interrupt-
flag bug would be invisible to a KA630 because it took a little longer
to get to that part of the interrupt routine.)

I have two Wombat boards with slightly different firmware.  (One is
labelled RQD11-EC and its diagnostic monitor calls itself WOMBAT;
the other is branded by SpectraLogic, I forget what model it calls
itself, but the monitor calls itself SLEUTH.)  My notes don't say
whether they both displayed the interrupt botch.  I do know that
communications with the diagnostic monitor worked fine with both.
The RQD11-EC claimed to have firmware (or perhaps diagnostic monitor)
version 2.38.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON