8237 DMA problem in PCs?

[Bart Berger]

In the 10/29/85 issue of PC Week there's an article that says 8237
DMA controller chips manufactured by AMD have a bug which causes them
to fail when two DMA channels are active and "'hold acknowledge' and
'chip select' come too close together". This is supposedly causing
failures in some PC's with streaming-tape drives or LAN cards.

Can anyone provide more technical details? AT&T uses the chip in the
PC 6300, and the article quotes Joel Schesser ("a member of the ATTIS
technical staff") as saying that they're working on a solution.
Anybody at ATTIS want to comment?

(I'm currently involved in LAN interface designs for PC's -- if there
is a hardware or software way to avoid this problem in existing PC's
I'd sure like to hear it!)

Bart M. Berger
{hplabs|fortune|ios}!oliveb!bb
Olivetti ATC, Inc.