Subject: Re: VMEBus for network appliances
To: Steve Woodford <scw@netbsd.org>
From: Al B. Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>
List: port-mvme68k
Date: 12/01/2000 14:17:47
On Fri, 1 Dec 2000, Steve Woodford wrote:

> > I've seen a lot of 68k VME board with IDE interfaces. What are the odds of
> > getting that working under NetBSD/mvme68k? My ideal machines would sport a
> 
> Can you provide a reference for these boards? It's possible some of them
> may work with NetBSD/mvme68k with a wee bit of tweaking as several
> manufacturers have put out near "clones" of the Motorola boards.

This is the coolest I've seen yet:

http://www.general-micro-systems.com/v56.html

(check out the block diagram right at the bottom)

What's the deal with stuff wired to the P2 socket? How do you get the SCSI
bus and the serial ports on that thing? Is that what a "transition
board" is for?

It'd be fairly neat for me to have a load of CPU cards on a backplane
communicating TCP/IP over said backplane... that'd make a great
extensible falloverable cluster.

Just imagine: as an Internet appliance (as made by www.cobalt.com),
something where you can add "disk cards" (CPU, RAM, hard disk, serving NFS
over the backplane), "CPU cards" (small disk for OS+swap) and "network
cards" (routers) at will... mix and match... Mmmmm....

> Cheers, Steve

Thanks,

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software