Brian Chase wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Gordon Zaft wrote:
> 
> > It wasn't clear to me if this thing did MSCP or not but I would
> > think that would be really important from a compatibility perspective.

It does not.
 
> It might be a bit much to ask for Chuck to start manufacturing these for
> people on the list.  Trying to meet people's expectations, even with
> limited demand and while making a modest profit would be sort of a pain.

I agree completely. :-)
 
> I'm under the impression that the these controllers don't do MSCP.  If
> they did, Chuck wouldn't be asking for people to write a device driver
> for them as we already have an MSCP driver.  Though it'd be nice to have
> MSCP support, I don't see this as necessary for supporting NetBSD.  It
> will likely be an issue for those using VMS or Ultrix, but they can
> write their own drivers :-)

NetBSD already has an IDE driver, but it is for the ISA bus. :-) I
looked at
using it, and decided is was beyond my abilities. Getting things running
on the PDP-11 was my primary goal. 

> One question I have is how difficult would it be to add a bootloader
> ROM to one of these controllers?  I know many of the SCSI/MSCP Q-Bus and
> Unibus controllers have the ability to drop into their built-in
> configuration utils from the console by executing code from a ROM at a
> specific address.  We should be able to use something similar to load a
> boot block from an IDE drive, but I'm not sure how easy this would be to
> add to the controller.  It wouldn't be so slick as a "b dua0" command,
> but it'd be convenient to not have to bootstrap from a floppy, the
> network, or another MFM disk.

I can imagine adding a ROM that would map into the Qbus memory address
space and
provide a boot program. On a PDP-11 this would eat up precious RAM. I
don't
know if/how the Qbus memory address space is mapped into the VAX address
space
or if it is executable, etc.
 
> -brian.

-chuck