On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Toru Nishimura wrote:

> Hello, SPARC folks.
> 
> I'm about to turn off SPARCcenter electricity due to the end of life
> (asset cycle) and retire it from duty within a few days.  According to
> NetBSD/sparc WEB page SPARCcenter is categolized as one of unsupported
> models.  Is it worth trying to run NetBSD/sparc on it, or just a pipe
> dream???  What's the technical obstracle to do that?  Without
> appropriate action, it will be dumped in a straight fashion as nCUBE
> or Challeges as we discarded recently.

The SS1000s were sweet little machines.  They held together pretty well,
as opposed to the SS2000s that have a habit of falling apart a piece at a
time.

>    sun4d w/ 4x TI,TMS390Z550 SuperSPARC, 327680KB memory, Fibre Channel RAID 

The primary issues are access to documentation and finding someone with
the appropriate motivation.  I know that there is a document describing
the sun4d architecture that might be extracted from Sun.  I had a copy of
it once.

The main issue is that the sun4d is designed much more like the sun4u than
the sun4m architecture: it has multiple SBus controllers, one or two on
each system board, and the iommu is associated with each SBus controller
rather than a single one system wide.  This requires a change similar to
sparc64 where you have multiple instances of iommus.

Also, it supports physical addresses >32 bits, so `paddr_t' needs to be
changed to a `u_int64_t' like on sparc64.

I presume the fibrechannel storage boxes are Sparc Storage Arrays or
A5x00s?  No matter.  Sun manufactured two different dual-ported SBus
fibre-channel adapters: the SOC for 1/4 speed point-to-point connections,
and the SOC+ for full-speed FCAL connections.  Both use proprietary
firmware.  The firmware for each is different.  I was surprised to see
that Linux has drivers for these cards, but it seems that they use the
firmware that's in the flash on the cards.  That firmware is old and
significantly buggy.  You could probably get enough info from the Linux
sources to write a driver, but without better microcode it will never be
very stable.

Eduardo Horvath