Subject: Re: Fore SBA-200E ATM Adapter
To: Jesse Sayre <sayre17833@earthlink.net>
From: Kurt J. Lidl <lidl@pix.net>
List: port-sparc
Date: 05/17/2004 10:49:08
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 01:10:30AM -0400, Jesse Sayre wrote:
> I've just come across recently several of these adapters (Fore SBA-200E ATM
> Adapters) and would wish to get them running in a few of my Station5's.
> I've made a some research over the archives of the mailing lists and have
> found previous emails suggesting to the lack of a driver for these adapters
> (would be upsetting as now I'd have several pieces of hardware with no
> practicual use).  But most of these emails and suggestions are years old and
> I am hopeful that in the past few years someone has written a driver for
> this adaptor.  If anyone has any knowledge of ones existance I would be
> greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

These are, as you probably know, 155Mbit (aka OC3) ATM adaptors.
FORE systems changed their name to be Marconi, so you might look for
that name too when looking for data.

The HARP atm project did drivers for this, and released them for FreeBSD.
When I was at UUNET, I had BSDi modify BSD/OS for the sparcs (BSD/OS 4.2)
to include this driver there to -- so, it's at least somewhat portable.
I ran many gigabytes of data through these cards, with these drivers, with
no problems.  (Note, we were doing straight IPv4 over ATM, none of the
LAN emulation stuff that Fore was pushing at the time.)  We used these cards
in Sparcstation20s (HyperSparc and SuperSparc) and Ultra2 machines.

I don't know if FreeBSD still has this in its codebase or not. The SBA-200
had both a PCI and a SBUS varient, which had the same bit of code downloaded
to both cards -- the onboard i960 (as I recall) just ran the same binary
module, which was able to deal with either the PCI or SBUS varients of the
card.

Here's one person who claims to have it working:
	http://www.fatsquirrel.org/veghead/wot/bsdfirewall.html

Here's the project's home page -- it looks pretty dormant, but that's true
of most things ATM-ish in nature :-)
	http://www.msci.magic.net/harp/

Good luck!

-Kurt