SunPCI II and Linux

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flak7 · Post by **flak7** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 12:29 pm

I found auction of one of those SunPCI daughterboards with celeron 600 + 64 Mb RAM. And have few questions.

1. Will those cards run Linux? (If not you can skip other points) If yes can I connect an IDE hd to it? On picture I see something like ide or fdd controller.

2. It seems that they are UPA slot based (right?)

3. Will they need special RAM?

mightyhal · Post by **mightyhal** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 3:48 am

Hi there...

I just bought one and have yet to put it into my computer... I just got a X21232A, PCi II, a 733 with 128Mb.

First, I have a nasty suspicion that no, they won't work under linux... but they soooo should....

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/ ... /0202.html has some other people looking to do this... I wonder if Sun has made any sort of drivers available via opensolaris...

Second, no they aren't UPA based (i think UPA is only for graphics, but i might be wrong)--they are PCI based (hence the catchy name). Looking at it, there is a soundcard, ethernet nic, vga, usb controller, as well as a jumper cable so you can hook up a serial and parallel port. And there is what looks suspicously like an IDE connector on top. I havent even popped the CD in to see the full manual yet (ust teling you what I see on the card).

And as far as ram... prolly. It is a sun card, after all

Mine has 128 Mb of 100MHz ram on a short DIMM card--

Hope that helps some...

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 6:29 pm

flak7 wrote:I found auction of one of those SunPCI daughterboards with celeron 600 + 64 Mb RAM. And have few questions.

1. Will those cards run Linux? (If not you can skip other points) If yes can I connect an IDE hd to it? On picture I see something like ide or fdd controller.

No, No. Cant connect a disk to it, no headers (from what I understand, there was planned support for this but it was never made to work due to problems with the card-to-solaris interface and having drives hosted on the card). Cant run them on linux .. its more than a driver issue, its an application issue. I run several SunPCI II cards on multiple machines, in addition to the "driver" comes an app which gives the actual interface.. provides an X window (or tells the card to pump to the onboard vga it has), allows you to do resets, assigns disk images to drive "letters", lets you copy/paste between solarisland and windowsland-on-the-card and so on. Ive asked about porting this to linux or open sourcing it in a few of sun's "webinars" and sadly they have no real interest in letting sunpci work on linux (or bsd or whatever).

2. It seems that they are UPA slot based (right?)

All are PCI based.

3. Will they need special RAM?

Kinda. They are supposed to take one of the slower types of pc2700 ram or something like that, i think the older ones took pc133 .. the sun pci II cards take some flavour of laptop ram ... ive had bad experience trying to make third party ram work in sun pci I cards, but never tried in a sunpci II card for lack of laptop ram...

In general, dony get your hopes up that they will ever run in linux. If you run one in solaris, they are -very- nice WAY better than running some kind of virtual machine, and there is very good support for them in solaris10 (tho not the sunpci I cards, only II and III)

flak7 · Post by **flak7** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 6:46 pm

How about this scenario:
Connect a monitor to vga port and a hub to usb port then connect usb keyboard and mouse to the hub. Finally connect a hd with pre-installed Linux to the usb hub by some usb2ide cable. I do not need any cut/paste between systems nor anything like that. I am far more interested in getting 2 computers running in the same box.

I know that Linux (on SPARC) can emulate Solaris binaries. How about use it to tell the driver controlling that Sun PCi card to "power on" and while closing the SPARC system to "power off" sun PCi card. The rest should be done by Linux on Sun PCi, because no fake disk must be made by external system. Linux on Sun PCi would be running on "big pendrive" thanks to it's own kernel based drivers.

What do you think about that?

flak7 · Post by **flak7** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 6:51 pm

BTW: This does not look like card for a typical PCI slot: http://www.allegro.pl/item95645812_sun_ ... imera.html

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 7:05 pm

The onboard bios firmware on the sunpci cards is too old to be able to boot from USB (Ive tried many ways to do this)

Emulating the solaris app isnt going to really work, since it also has its own kernel-land drivers (which you cant just plug into a gentoo kernel and have it work)...

Thats the exact same card in the picture as the one I have, it fits nice and "normal" into either a 32bit or 64bit pci slot. I have mine in a 64bit pci slot in my SB1000 , tho ive used a sun pci version1 (with an amd k6-2 on it) in systems as far back as the ultra5, and the SPCI1 card only uses a 32bit pci plug

If you just need the 2 comps in one, you can easily get that out of the spci card ... if you run solaris as the primary OS .... the spci card -does- run linux (dunno if they will run gentoo, but sun distributes drivers for a few RH based distros at least)

.. wish I had better news...

flak7 · Post by **flak7** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 7:50 pm

Wait!

This thing has an fdd plug (right?). How about floppy boot! Floppy with grub & small kernel. Tell grub to boot linux on "pendrive"...

Solaris as a primary os?! Eee... do you know any virtual machine to run Solaris on Linux? I do not need "full" Solaris just the SunOS kernel + sh + this SUN PCi app/driver.

BTW: Will this card fit/work on Ultra 5's pci slot (32bit) .

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 7:54 pm

Sadly, nogo on the floppy ... the system uses the host computers floppy drive (same as its CDrom and such)
The on-board headers were there for future expantion but never used. act like they arent there.

I dont know much about virtualizing solaris on linux, but im guessing it wouldnt be a good performer.. others might know better there.

flak7 · Post by **flak7** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 8:04 pm

F@#$!!!

SunPCI II and Linux

SunPCI II and Linux

Re: SunPCI II and Linux