Re: Sil3114 SATAlink card in U5/U10

[Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>]

One place you can go looking is for PCI SATA cards that were bootable in Apple 
PowerMac (PowerPC) systems. Both Apple and Sun used OpenBoot Firmware (the 
Forth boot environment specified in IEEE 1275), but Apple's implementation was 
... shall we say ... less than complete.

The whole notion behind OBP was that one could design an add-in card, write a 
Forth boot driver to be placed in PROM on the card, and then that card (e.g. 
PCI) could be added into any system that supported OBP (IEEE 1275) without 
regard to the CPU ISA (e.g. mc68k family, SPARC, UltraSPARC, PowerPC, etc).

So, it might work, or it might not work - it will depend upon how complete the 
PCI SATA card manufacturer was in writing (or having contracted to be written) 
the Forth driver in the PROM on the card. Lots of hardware manufacturers are a 
bit sloppy (lazy) about this, in that once it works for their target market, 
they don't typically think about checking compliance (compatibility) for 
systems outside that target market.

Now, there's nothing stopping you from adding a Forth driver for a particular 
PCI SATA card to the NVRAM of a Sun ... provided that NVRAM stays around (the 
batteries keep dying in old gear like that).

        Erik <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>