Sun PCI II Coprocessor Support for Linux?

nprodrom asks: "Has anyone done any developement on drivers/software to support the Sun PCI II Coprocessor board under Linux? I know very little about creating such things, but everything I've read makes me think that it must be possible (except for the fact that I haven't seen anything about someone actually doing it). I've got this crazy hair-brained idea of having about six of these things running in one big Linux box to do some really cool terminal stuff. Now I just need to find someone else who is smart enough to write it for me. Never heard of these things? You can find out more information about them here". These things are yet another way to run Windows under a Unix system, this (it seems) is made expressly for Solaris. Would supporting this piece of hardware under different Unicies be possible?

Re:Could be useful for remote hosting

[cymen]

Except as pointed out above (in other thread) you can only have one of these cards in a Sun box so NOBODY HAS A BUNCH OF BOXES FULL OF THESE THINGS!

Not quite...

[mduell]

"I've got this crazy hair-brained idea of having about six of these things running in one big Linux box to do some really cool terminal stuff"
But in the website he links to, it explicitly says,
"Note: SunPCi II software drivers currently support a maximum of one card in any Sun workstation."
So that wont work. Sounds like a cool idea though (although, I'd run Windows 2000 to play games...)

Mark Duell

What is the advantage.

[pete-classic]

This thing is a low end PC (600MHz celeron 64M) for $500 with "anti-redundant" features like shared hard disk and power supply.

What do you hope to gain?

-Peter


"There is no number '1.'"

Re:Could be useful for remote hosting

[randombit]

Why not just use something like VMWare on actual PCs? It would be cheaper.

Well, it would be pretty useful if you already had a big Sun box sitting around with a bunch of these cards.

Re:Could be useful for remote hosting

[randombit]

Except as pointed out above (in other thread) you can only have one of these cards in a Sun box so NOBODY HAS A BUNCH OF BOXES FULL OF THESE THINGS!

True. Though as other pointed out, it's probably just bad drivers.

If you like, s/big machine/a lot of Ultra5s/ in my previous comment.

In any case, it would be a pretty cool hack to be able to use both the normal CPU and an x86 chip at the same time (you could probably set it up in Linux to automatically run x86 executables there - x86 "emulation" in hardware on a SPARC)

Re:Could be useful for remote hosting

[rakslice]

Why not just use something like VMWare on actual PCs? It would be cheaper.

Re:Not quite...

[jbridge21]

That's just for the probably-crappy driver that Sun wrote for Solaris.

If you're going to be making your own driver for the card, you might as well have multi-card support, right?
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Could be useful for remote hosting

[phr1]

If you're a colo provider, instead of having to host a separate box for each customer, you could have fewer boxes each with a bunch of these cards inside. Each customer would have full root access to his card, get to run the OS of his choice and so forth. Of course it could be set up so the cards can take over the PCI bus of the host workstation and start messing with other cards and physical i/o devices. It all depends on how the cards are set up. It seems worth looking into. At a lot of colo places, rack space is more expensive than the hardware installed in it.