Hacking A PC Around The Sun PCI IIPro? 20
lowlymortal writes: "Hi,
I have a few Sun PCi II Pro cards that are not being used (no jokes please). The white paper about it can be found here. Although, it does not have an IDE/SCSI (I know the older ones had them!), it does have a PCI bus (both the normal one and the "Sun" one). What I want to know is, whether any brave /.er has tried building a PC around this?
Thanks." An oddball piece of equipment perhaps, but it certainly seems to have all the necessary guts -- any takers?
Re:??? (Score:1)
chillpill="coolness"
while ( reading slashdot );
do
echo $chillpill >>
done
Re:I can't sell them! (Score:1)
Re:I dunno.. (Score:1)
Obvious (Score:2)
Re:I dunno.. (Score:2)
Re:I dunno.. (Score:2)
Best bet to make them work, I think, would be to buy a cheap Ultra. Any of the PCI UltraSPARC would accept and run a SunPCi, so I assume they will support a single SunPCi II.
I dunno.. (Score:5)
The newer ones use firmware and a host driver to emulate the primary IDE/SCSI device. How their scheme works precisely is beyond me.. One thing I remember that was funny about the old ones; You couldn't touch the card's drive images unless the card was running, and it was treated just like another device even though it was not much more than a raw file on the HD.. So I'm guessing you basically have a pair of incestous HAL, on in firmware in the card, one in software on the host playing games on who is going to what. The host's first driver playing read-write for buffered FS data like a overglorified HDC so the host didn't have to know about the FS, and the card providing raw data to the host's (logically) second driver from a firmware cheat like another giant HDC, but doing it directly from a read handed to it by the host...
I'd say no go, sorry.
Re:I can't sell them! (Score:2)
Re:??? (Score:2)
bash:
This brain is permissioned as read-only.
You actually expect to teach an old dog new tricks?
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
Re:I dunno.. (Score:1)
Much of the second part did not make too much sense to me. Anyway, the question I want to ask you is - have you worked with these things (old or the new one)? Can you translate the above in plain English? Thanks.
I can't sell them! (Score:1)
Re:I dunno.. (Score:1)
Re:Figure this out (Score:1)
a) What's a PGA? b) I thought it already had the PCI (or is the PCI "bridge" different than "PCI"? Here is what I know - the "PCI" is basically a bus (set of wires
Re:??? (Score:1)
Oh,guess what troll, sun also makes solaris and has an ongoing interested in linux.
Ideas... (Score:2)
Power Req (Score:1)
Whoa (Score:1)
Re:Whoa (Score:1)
Re:Imagine (Score:2)
Figure this out (Score:1)