On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Kurt J. Lidl wrote:

[gratuitous snip]

> These cards are manufactured by Network Peripherals, Inc.
> (https://www.npix.com)

Do you know if the Cisco sbus FDDI cards are the essentially rebadged
NPIs?  I'd heard that they were, but never having held one in my hand I'm
still a bit dubious.

[another gratutitous snip]

> As for the wisdom of doing a SMT implementation in the software
> driver, as opposed to a firmware implemenation that runs on an
> on-the-board processor, well, I'm not going to to go into that.
> Certainly the DEC FDDI cards, with their on-board 68000, do all
> the SMT processing there, and the OS driver doesn't need to deal with
> that at all.  It's good in that if the vendor ships a good SMT,
> then everybody who uses the card wins.  If the vendor ships a crappy
> SMT, everybody loses.  In this case, it appears that DEC shipped a
> pretty good SMT, so everybody wins.
> 
> The SMT that NPI ships, of course, has multiple man-years of effort
> in it.  I can understand why they don't want to give it away.

Do you know if the SMT runs on the FDDI card, similar to the DEC FDDI
boards?  I don't think I'd be too happy with a bunch of lower layer
network handling running in the kernel, but I've no numbers or experience
to back that up.  Just a feeling.

> All that being said, the NPI cards works really, really well.  I
> have a couple of dozen of them deployed in Sparcs running BSD/OS.
> (BSDi licensed the NPI driver and ported it to their sparc
> port, runs great on Ultrasparc and Hypersparc and Supersparc machines.
> I have never tried it on sun4c machines -- not very interesting
> hardware.  If you are dying for a reliable BSD system that runs on
> sparc hardware, and comes with source for most everything, you should
> talk to BSDi.  The *only* binary-only module for the entire sparc tree
> is the FDDI driver, naturally.)

Possibly.  For me, however, NetBSD is probably my only alternative.  I've
6 different platforms that I run on, and having _exactly_ the same
environment is the only thing [besides a cup of coffee] that keeps me
sane...

Plus, I was hoping to give other NetBSD/sparc users access to FDDI.  I
don't know how many other people would use it, but it's another card in
the NetBSD hand ;-)

Thanks for the info though.  I'm going to try to get my hands on an NPI
card, maybe try to talk to a few people... no harm in asking (at least, I
hope not).

-Jon
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 "Hey - this old machine screams like a snail on acid!" - (a true
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