On Mon, 16 Mar 1998, Brian D Chase wrote:

> 
> 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.

Have you seen RFC2143, "Encapsulating IP with the Small Computer
System Interface"?  

Tom

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

--
Thomas Traylor
Thomas.Traylor@mci.com
ttraylor@titan.mcit.com
(719) 535-1269