On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 12:39:29AM +0100, Sten Spans wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Rick Kelly wrote:
> 
> > Rafal Boni said:
> >
> > >Isn't there also some stupidity with respect to the channels (chip design or
> > >brain-damage prevent us from accessing them independently or forcing us to
> > >serialize access), or am I mis-remembering?
> >
> > I have an Ultra 5 running 1.6.1 using a Symbios Logic 53c875 and an 18 gig
> > disk. Works pretty good.
> >
> 
> Please note that anything, yes anything, other than a 875 wont work,
> for booting that is. This chip is supported because it's in the
> ultra60, axi and so on, which means that the obp has special
> support for it.

Adaptec cards will work, if you know someone with a pci-equipped Mac to
flash them. I'm using an Adaptec AHA-2940UW flashed for OFW in my Ultra5,
and it boots from it just fine.

> Most scsi cards will work but they won't have the fcode to allow you
> to boot from them. You'll need to boot from ide, cdrom or somesuch.
> The main cards your looking at are a special adaptec 2940OF with
> fcode, seems to be rare and not really supported, and the symbios
> cards with fcode. Sun also makes scsi cards but these mostly
> have 875's on them.

the Adaptec 29*-OFW cards are just plain adaptec 29* cards that have been
flashed with OFW code. You can turn a PC-bios adaptec card into an
openfirmware compatible and bootable card with an adaptec utility on a mac.

> 
> Some vendors, most notably antares and intraserver, made
> symbios cards with fcode. Intraserver has been bought by
> lsi, who now supports the intraserver cards.
> The cards are quite hard to obtain nowadays.
> 
> The only easy option is symbios 875.

In my experience looking around, finding specific sym cards is not easy.

-Sean

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