STRANGE ERROR MESSAGE HAS ME CONFUSED.....

[<@IU.AI.SRI.COM:slug-admin@iu.ai.sri.com>]

    Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1993 19:59 EST
    From: "Pretend to spank me. I'm a Pseudo-Masochist."
	  <91638%TAYLORU@UICVM.UIC.EDU>

Slap!

    Dear SLUGgers,

    The 3640 that I think I am going to purchase has 2 2mw cards and 2 1 mw cards
    in it.  The cards are installed in this manner
	  slot 0          slot 1     slot 2     slot 3       slot 4
	   2 MW           2 MW       1 MW       I/O card     1MW


    When I active the hello.boot program it does this...

    it loads all the command files and then
    Initializes the hardware tables...

    When it gets to the card in slot four it does this
    "Card being assigned to slot 6
     card being assigned to slot 5
     card being assigned to slot 29. -- no room in memory space "

    What does this mean?
    Will it be a problem later?
    There is exactly 6 MW of memory so should it be doing this to me?


    Ed Smith

Aha! Gonzo engineering at its best!
These things were designed when 512KW memory boards were considered
impressive -- Hey, 1W was 4.5 bytes!

They had a number of slots and the foresight  to provide for Virtual
slots. (unless it's just the capability of newer FEP proms to paper over
it?) This allowed for larger memory boards to be used later on.

Each 512K of memory gets assigned to a virtual slot.  In your case, each
physical slot gets assigned to up to 4 virtual slots.

Unfortunately, there is a maximum number of virtual slots, or maximum
physical (ram) address space, which I think is 5Meg.

It doesn't harm anything to leave it as it is.  But you may as well pull
one of the 1MW boards out.  It's not being used, but it is (I assumed)
powered up and `wearing out'.  So pull it and keep it as a spare.


  bruce
  miller@cam.nist.gov