On Mon, 16 Mar 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:

> <Heh.  AFAIK NetBSD supports multiprocessor machines in only a few
> <cases, and only in the sense that it doesn't break in the presence of
> <multiple processors.  Last I heard it doesn't actually use the
> <additional processors for anything, ever.
> 
> It would seem a useful configureation would be the primary as usual and 
> the slave being booted by the primary and running xwindows using the bus 
> as the interconnect rather than eithernet.  There should be enough ram
> for the cpu to do that.

Well, I don't know about that.  I'm pretty sure X would need more RAM than
the 1Meg available on the second CPU...

On a slightly related note, I think I've heard it discussed somewhere at
some point about chaining VAXstations together over their SCSI busses. It
may have been with one of the VAX/Linux people.  In the case of the
VS3100's with dual SCSI controllers would it be possible to say take two
machines and patch their SCSI/B (2nd) SCSI controllers together?  Then set
up each controller with a unique SCSI ID on the shared bus.  Then you
could build a driver for the SCSI devices to make them look like
point-to-point network interfaces.  Basically use them for passing data
between VAXen at "high speed".  On top of this you could use something
like PVM or MPI to run parallel computations across the machines.  And
then lets say you take the dual SCSI controller machines, you chain then
together in a big long bus topology, or even a big ring :-) 

So, is this a technically feasible abuse of SCSI?  And if so, how hard
would it be to make driver for the SCSI devices that made them look like
network interfaces?  AND if we could intersperse a SCSI disk drive or two
in the chain, we might have a faster alternative to ethernet for shared
disk storage.

-brian.
---
Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!