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USB 2.0 on Ultra 2 via PCMCIA
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ibtim13
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 12 Sep 2003
Posts: 84
Location: Troy, NY

PostPosted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 6:40 pm    Post subject: USB 2.0 on Ultra 2 via PCMCIA Reply with quote

I am looking to get USB 2.0 working on my Ultra 2 so I can have
very large, very cheap, reletively fast directly attached storage.
I've never seen or expected to see a USB 2.0 SBus card
(although I don't see why one could not exist, SBus is faster than the
PCI slots found in PC's, maybe if I was an electrical engineer....)
Anyways, I just thought of something.
PCMCIA adapters do exist for SBus,
and USB 2.0 adapters exist for PCMCIA
therefore, I should be able to get USB 2.0 working on my Ultra2
with a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card and an SBus PCMCIA adapter.

Does anyone know any reason why this would not work?
Or any reason why this would not work with gentoo?
Or anything to look out for when trying this if it might work?

Thanks
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)
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Weeve
Retired Dev
Retired Dev


Joined: 30 Oct 2002
Posts: 641

PostPosted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 2:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You may end up running into a wall due to the fact that there are no SBUS Cardbus controllers, only PCMCIA. What this means is you would have to find a 16 bit USB 2.0 controller, if such a thing exists. IIRC, PCMCIA is also slower than Cardbus, which would limit the speed on any possible 16 bit USB 2.0 controllers that may exist.

Also, there is no current working driver for the SBUS PCMCIA controllers, though there was a post to the sparclinux mailing list around a year or so ago where someone posted what work they had done towards making a functional driver.

That all being said, if you do find anything, I'd be more than interested to hear about it.
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ibtim13
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 12 Sep 2003
Posts: 84
Location: Troy, NY

PostPosted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I did find out a few things about the status of the SBus PCMCIA card, namely that it works in OpenBSD.
I think I just might invest in an SBus PCMCIA controller and see if I can't write drivers for it myself. I've got plenty of PCMCIA cards laying around to play with. Also, I'm going to look around and see if I can find any electrical engineers at my school (there are plenty, I go to Rensselaer Polytech) who would be interested in helping me actually put together a real SBus USB2.0 card. It probably wouldn't work as a commercial thing, but maybe I can find enough academic interest to get something working, and if it does work out Linux drivers would be the first to exist.

I just got 2 400Mhz processors for my Ultra 2 and another 512MB of ram so I'm inspired now.
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)
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stonent
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Joined: 07 Aug 2003
Posts: 1139
Location: Texas

PostPosted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 4:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeve wrote:
You may end up running into a wall due to the fact that there are no SBUS Cardbus controllers, only PCMCIA. What this means is you would have to find a 16 bit USB 2.0 controller, if such a thing exists. IIRC, PCMCIA is also slower than Cardbus, which would limit the speed on any possible 16 bit USB 2.0 controllers that may exist.

Also, there is no current working driver for the SBUS PCMCIA controllers, though there was a post to the sparclinux mailing list around a year or so ago where someone posted what work they had done towards making a functional driver.

That all being said, if you do find anything, I'd be more than interested to hear about it.


PCMCIA has a bandwidth of about 12 megabits and as much as I looked, I never even found a 16bit USB 1.x card on the market.
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