> I am running NetBSD on a sun 4/370.  I may have opportunity soon
> to have some IPI disk controllers and disks, but I notice that there
> doesn't seem to be support for these in the NetBSD-sparc tree.
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> 1) Is it true that this equipment is unsupported?

Yes.

> 
> 2) Is anyone working on a driver for the IPI panther controller?

No.

> 
> 3) Would anyone be upset if I started working on such a thing?

No.

> 4) Where do the folks that work on NetBSD-sparc (or NetBSD-sun3
>    for that matter) get their hardware documentation?  And a

For many devices the data-sheets from the original chip manufacturer
are useful and often sufficient to produce a working driver. Some
docs may be had from Sun, but often they are playing "hard to get"..
I don't know how they feel about their IPI adapters, though.

In any case, ideally an IPI driver, like ATAPI, is implemented as a
variant of a SCSI system. I'm not really familiar with the IPI details,
but it's command structure is very similar to SCSI, though less rich.

-pk