On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Rick Kelly wrote:

> Rafal Boni said:
>
> >Isn't there also some stupidity with respect to the channels (chip design or
> >brain-damage prevent us from accessing them independently or forcing us to
> >serialize access), or am I mis-remembering?
>
> I have an Ultra 5 running 1.6.1 using a Symbios Logic 53c875 and an 18 gig
> disk. Works pretty good.
>

Please note that anything, yes anything, other than a 875 wont work,
for booting that is. This chip is supported because it's in the
ultra60, axi and so on, which means that the obp has special
support for it.

Most scsi cards will work but they won't have the fcode to allow you
to boot from them. You'll need to boot from ide, cdrom or somesuch.
The main cards your looking at are a special adaptec 2940OF with
fcode, seems to be rare and not really supported, and the symbios
cards with fcode. Sun also makes scsi cards but these mostly
have 875's on them.

Some vendors, most notably antares and intraserver, made
symbios cards with fcode. Intraserver has been bought by
lsi, who now supports the intraserver cards.
The cards are quite hard to obtain nowadays.

The only easy option is symbios 875.


I did a little diggin around in fcode booting land because
I recently purchased som 8951u symbios cards without fcode.
I looked at the flash chips, and flashing these symbios cards
with fcode seems to be theoretically possible, without soldering.
The 8951u cards have only 64k of flash, but the readme of the
lsi/intraserver flash update lists the intraserver 895 cards
( 6100 series ) as only having fcode, no pci bios, which suggest
they have only 64k flash as well.

The "problem" is that the sparc firmware update tool doesnt like my
regular symbios cards, I have found the intraserver pci subvendor
id ( 13e9 ) embedded in the code along with the correct chip id's
( 1000 ( symbios ) 000c ( 895 ) ), but changing these hasn't gottem
me anywhere yet. It might be possible to lift the fcode out
of the flashupdate binary and get it onto the card with
a msdos flash tool, but I havent really investigated that
route yet, I'm not quite sure that this would produce the expected
results :).

Just had to get that off my chest, and into google.
If any one else has any clue, be sure to give me a hint :)

On a related not, I can report that 8951u's will probably
work with your alpha's. I have it working with a 164sx and
a alphastation 500. Wether tru64 likes them is another matter,
some reports claim it wont even work with intraserver cards.
Tru64 5.1a doesn't like my 895 that's for sure, it did like
the 875 which was in there previously.

-- 
Sten Spans

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen - Anthem