At 07:51 PM 2/6/2001 -0500, Todd Vierling wrote:
>So the question is:  does your "dssibus" do the MSCP protocol encapsulation
>and decapsulation, or does the controller take that work away from you?  If
>the former case, it should share that encap/decap code by attaching a
>"mscpbus" instead.

The controller sends packets to nodes, it doesn't care particularly what is 
in them. Similar to a network controller.

>This has nothing to do with "protocol vs. interface" -- it has entirely to
>do with whether the main CPU, or the controller card, is in charge of the
>protocol layer.  If you don't believe that this is standard for NetBSD, I
>encourage you to look at the the "scsibus* at umass?" and
>"atapibus* at umass?" USB attachments.

Thanks for the pointer.

>The networking subsystem is very different from the disk subsystem in
>NetBSD, so this isn't really relevant.

Except that DSSI is a networking subsystem, it just happens to have bits in 
parallel and only 8 "hosts" but it does both connection oriented (virtual 
circuit) and connectionless (datagram) packets to implement both host to 
host and host to controller protocols.

--Chuck