On Tue, 17 Sep 96 21:48:10 PDT 
 mjacob@feral.com (Matthew Jacob) wrote:

 > The Alpha 8x00 has onboard (KFTIA) SCSI host adapters based on
 > the Emulex (excuse me, now "Qlogic") ISP chip.

These are the same ISP1020 SCSI chips that the AlphaStation [56]00 comes 
with... NetBSD doesn't yet support them...

Also, it's worth noting that those chips don't live directly on the 
KFTIA.  They're actually on a PCI bus, which sits on some sort of 
bridge.  I'm not certain, but that particular PCI instance may be one of 
the (multiple) primary PCIs on the 8200; the KFTIA holds 2 SCSI busses, 
and 2 Tulips (21140s, I think), and one "hose" (which, on the particular 
8200 you're working on, connects to a PCI bus, which in turn bridges to 
EISA).

 > Has a driver for this been ported to NetBSD, or should I plan on
 > possibly porting the Linux version (or doing my own, or....)?

If it were me, I'd say "write my own".  I just looked at the Linux 
driver.  Besides being GPL'd, it's ... a mess.  It might be reasonable 
documentation on how the chip works, but beyond that...

 > It's also possible I can ignore these ISP SCSI busses for the moment,
 > shove an Adaptec 2940 or an NCR script engine PCI card into a PCI slot
 > and boot off of that (yes, I probably won't get very far past that anyway-
 > but that's what I'm starting to work on...)

If you're going to use an alternate SCSI, use an NCR53c810 SIOP.  The 
"ahc" driver is _far_ from being safe on 64-bit systems, and probably has 
alignment problems on the alpha, too.  Probably your best bet is to just 
load the kernel from DUh and nfs_mountroot ... talking to one of those 
PCI slots requires figuring out how the bridge between them works; it'll 
likely be a lot easier to just figure out the first PCI and then talk to 
the Tulip, first :-)

Gee, Matt ... you ought to pop by my office sometime (I'm in 222-1), and 
I'll give you all the code I wrote for the 8200 O(1 year) ago... :-)

 -- save the ancient forests - http://www.bayarea.net/~thorpej/forest/ -- 
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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