In <Pine.BSI.3.95.970114144726.16007G-100000@crayola.broder.com> jeremy@broder.com (Jeremy Cooper) writes:

>After nearly a year of research and design discussions, we (Gordon Ross
>and Jeremy Cooper) are pleased to announce that the NetBSD port to the
>Sun3X architecture has reached a major milestone.  The current
>kernel boots up to the point just before mounting the root filesystem.
>At this stage it is stable enough to facilitate the development device
>drivers.

This is wonderful news! I'm planning to work out some speed-up's for the
3/80's (I have a couple of 33 MHz 68030/68882 chipsets), so to be able to
use something other than SunOS on my handful would be a Good Thing.

>Q. What device drivers are needed?

>A. Much of the standard sun3 devices, such as the Zilog serial drivers,
>   have been ported.  The major devices that need to be implemented or
>   debugged are the SCSI and Ethernet controllers.

>   The Sun3x architecture contains two possible SCSI devices: an Emulex
>   chip used in model 3/80, and an unknown chipset in the 3/470.  The
>   Emulex is probably identical to that used in most SPARC 4Cs.

The 3/470 used VME SCSI cards, so there's a choice of the Sun-2 (discrete
logic) or the Sun-3 (NCR-5380) boards.

The 3/80 uses the Emulex 2400138, the same (or very similar) SCSI controller
that is in the SS1's. It should be possible to grab the ESP-SCSI code from
the Sparc port and graft it into a 3x kernel.

>   There are also two possible Ethernet controllers.  The Am7990 in the
>   3/80 and an Intel chip in the 3/470.

>   The 3/80 contains a (yet unknown) parallel port chipset which is
>   probably identical to the one found in the SPARC IPX.  (Do not quote me
>   on this.)  Once this driver is written, it should be beneficial to both
>   ports.  This is not nearly as crucial as SCSI and Ethernet.

The parallel port controller is a chip made by Paradise (aka Western
Digital). The 3/80 board I have here in front of me (it's a 501-1401 - I've
never seen a 501-1650, which reportedly used a Weitek math co-pro instead of
the 68882) has the chip labelled simply as a 'PPC1'.

Regards,

Craig.
-- 
            Craig Dewick. Send email to 'cdewick@lios.apana.org.au'
   Point a web browser at 'http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick/sun_ark.html' to
       access my collection of Sun information and links to other places.