On August 8, Jon Lindgren wrote:
> I know that no sbus FDDI cards are supported, and I believe it was due to
> lack of docs on the chipsets.
> 
> Can anyone tell me what chipsets we need info about?  I see tons of FDDI
> cards up for auction/sale/give-away/trash/etc... and my mouth waters with
> the prospect of firing up a few of those bad boys and connecting them to
> my network.
> 
> I can't see why Sun shouldn't release info about these, especially given
> many company's new found embrace for open source... perhaps a bit of slick
> talking, pseudo beers and grumbling on my knees will get docs for some of
> these chipsets.  And that'd certainly make us FDDI people scream with joy.

  This problem has gotten so bad that I've started moving away from
Sun hardware toward Alphas.  Alpha systems running NetBSD have
excellent FDDI support for the [cheap and available] DEC FDDI cards.

  As I understand it, the bulk of the problem is that the
manufacturers of the Sbus FDDI interfaces were complete idiots and
did lots of the FDDI protocol stuff in the device driver, not on the
card.  I don't know about you, but I've got *other* work for my
SPARC processor to do...the network interface hardware is supposed to
handle the damned wire protocols.  So these Sbus FDDI cards have dumb
hardware and a HUGE device driver...for [puke] Solaris.

  So...not only do these folks build bare-minimum
physical-interface-only hardware, but they don't even release
programming info for THAT so someone with lots of time and motivation
could try to write an SMT implementation etc etc to handle one of
these boards.  *grumble*

  So now I use low-end to midrange Alphas for the stuff that I used to
use SS5/10/20 systems for.  I particularly like the AS200, AS255, and
AS1000 systems, and I just got an AS800-5/333 that I *really* like.
Slap in a DEFTA/DEFEA/DEFPA board, plug in your fiber, and away you
go.  Very quickly. :)


            -Dave McGuire