Re: Booting sparc64 from SSD

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On Sun, 18 May 2014 14:03:52 +1000
Darren Reed <darrenr%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> Looking at my Sun SB2500, I'm thinking of ways to make it less noisy and 
> less power hungry and one of the obvious ones would seem to be replacing 
> the 10k SCSI drives with some SSD.
> 
> The mechanical problem of getting everything mounted I can deal with.
> 
> But what I would like some advice on is which PCI cards are well suited 
> to being mounted inside the SB2500 and that will support booting from SSD?

My sb2500 boots from a CompactFlash card in an adaptor plugged into the
unused onboard ATA port ( the other one is hooked to the DVD drive ).
It's only UDMA33 but just for loading the kernel and a rescue system
that's more than enough. For everything else I have a 500GB SATA-II
disk on a Silicon Image PCI-X card, sitting in one of the 66MHz slots
so there's plenty of bandwidth to go.
The adaptor is ~$5 at monoprice, the SATA card was about $20 or so.
Relevant dmesg bits:

siisata0 at pci0 dev 2 function 0: CMD Technology SiI3124 SATALink (rev. 0x02)
siisata0: interrupting at ivec 700
siisata0: SiI3124, 3.0Gb/s
siisata0: 64-bit 66MHz PCI
atabus2 at siisata0 channel 0
atabus3 at siisata0 channel 1
atabus4 at siisata0 channel 2
atabus5 at siisata0 channel 3
...
aceride0 at pci2 dev 13 function 0: Acer Labs M5229 UDMA IDE Controller (rev. 
0xc4)
aceride0: bus-master DMA support present
aceride0: using PIO transfers above 137GB as workaround for 48bit DMA access 
bug, expect reduced performance
aceride0: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
aceride0: using ivec 1f98 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus0 at aceride0 channel 0
aceride0: secondary channel configured to native-PCI mode
atabus1 at aceride0 channel 1
...
siisata0 port 0: device present, speed: 3.0Gb/s
wd1 at atabus2 drive 0
wd1: <WDC WD5000AAKX-083CA1>
wd1: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd1: 465 GB, 969021 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 976773168 sectors
wd1: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
wd1(siisata0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100) 
(using DMA)
...
wd0 at atabus0 drive 0
wd0: <SanDisk SDCFH-008G>
wd0: drive supports 1-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd0: 7629 MB, 15501 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 15625216 sectors
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 4 (Ultra/66)
wd0(aceride0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33) (using DMA)

have fun
Michael