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Sun Microsystems

Hacking A PC Around The Sun PCI IIPro? 20

Posted by timothy from the good-things-small-packages dept.
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?
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Hacking A PC Around The Sun PCI IIPro? More

Hacking A PC Around The Sun PCI IIPro?

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  • i think it was a joke

    chillpill="coolness"

    while ( reading slashdot );
    do
    echo $chillpill >> /dev/brain

    done
  • Since when does that stop people?
  • You could snare yourself a SunBlade 100 for ~$1000... UltraSPARC-II @ 500mhz... It's PC-class hardware, but so what? It'll run a SunPCi-II just fine!! As for me, I'll take my Ultra 60, thanks.... At least my company does _ONE_ thing right! :-)
  • Just eBay the card you have for a grand or so and purchase a new machine. It's simple, really... :)

  • Here I am, sitting in front of a term, and I want to see the files sitting on the cards virtual image. I do ls, the host sends a request to the card for the directory listing, the card sends a request to the host for a chunk from the virtual drive, the card plays some decoding and FS games and hands the host back arguably the same data the host had in the first place..
  • Nope, you'd have to basically rewrite the drivers. And when I say drivers, I use it loosly, cuz it's mostly userland and wouldn't be available to those with educational access to the Solaris source.

    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)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @03:54PM (#139577) Homepage Journal
    The old SiS based ones with the IDE header (Are they still SiS?), you stand a chance.. All you have to do is suck power off a backplane, or just rig it. I seem to recall you could leave them running when taking the system down for diag, so long as system power wasn't cycled, so the keybd and mouse hooks aren't relied upon nor even expected all of the time.

    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.
  • Sell them and use the proceeds to buy office property that the office can use. Preferably something with educational (read: hack) value.
  • nope, that would give a perfectly logical error:
    bash: /dev/brain: Permission denied
    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."
  • 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...

    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.
  • Hello all, I can't sell them because they are office property!
  • So, if I understand correctly, even with a PCI based IDE/SCSI controller (assuming I can rig everything together), it will not work?
  • I didn't know someone was still reading this story. Anyway, two things:
    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 :)) "driven" by a controller-like chip that interfaces with the main processor and maybe other devices as well. Is this correct?
  • actually, sun does build computers, they are a computer maker. Also, you could run linux on this card if you could get it to function.

    Oh,guess what troll, sun also makes solaris and has an ongoing interested in linux.
  • With the older cards you could buy a PCI bus extender and use it to start the basics for a PC. Add a PCI video card and use the onboard IDE. Works OK from my past experiance. With the newer cards ( No IDE onboard) you are SOL.. sorry... On the bright side, you can always put them into a Sun PCI machine (Ultra5 works great) and run it there... works great as a firewall if you do not want to put ipfilter on Solaris. Or, a GREAT way to mess with the NT guys in your office... "Heu guys look, Sun now has an exchange server..."
  • I don't see how you could power it with out another pci bus to plug it into. I would guess anything you could build from it would be similar to a rackmount server, not the same processing power though :)
  • Dude, those cards are sweet. If you can't figure out a use for them, I'll gladly buy one from you. I'm serious. Post a reply if you're interested.
  • Hey dude, keep 'em coming. I can assure you that if I actually gave a shit about karma, I would have stopped posting long ago. Check out my posting history, for Christ's sakes. So I'm going to go ahead and post them, and wait for the downward spiral to being. Bring it on!
  • Yeah, I have a few spare PCI slots. Wonder if you could plug them into a PC? Why then I'd simply hack Hurd's GnuMach microkernel to take advantage of them, and my new .NOT server would easily take over the world! Muahahah...
  • The card gets its BIOS from ~/pc/cmos.bin on your Sun system. The only ways I can think of to do this involve a soldering iron, a PGA to emulate the PCI bridge and an EEPROM chip to store the BIOS data. Good Luck.

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