Hacking A PC Around The Sun PCI IIPro?

lowlymortal writes: "Hi, I have a few Sun PCi II Pro cards that are not being used (no jokes please). The white paper about it can be found here. Although, it does not have an IDE/SCSI (I know the older ones had them!), it does have a PCI bus (both the normal one and the "Sun" one). What I want to know is, whether any brave /.er has tried building a PC around this? Thanks." An oddball piece of equipment perhaps, but it certainly seems to have all the necessary guts -- any takers?

Comments

Obvious

[eric2hill]

Just eBay the card you have for a grand or so and purchase a new machine. It's simple, really... :)

Re:I dunno..

[technos]

Here I am, sitting in front of a term, and I want to see the files sitting on the cards virtual image. I do ls, the host sends a request to the card for the directory listing, the card sends a request to the host for a chunk from the virtual drive, the card plays some decoding and FS games and hands the host back arguably the same data the host had in the first place..

Re:I dunno..

[technos]

Nope, you'd have to basically rewrite the drivers. And when I say drivers, I use it loosly, cuz it's mostly userland and wouldn't be available to those with educational access to the Solaris source.

Best bet to make them work, I think, would be to buy a cheap Ultra. Any of the PCI UltraSPARC would accept and run a SunPCi, so I assume they will support a single SunPCi II.

I dunno..

[technos]

The old SiS based ones with the IDE header (Are they still SiS?), you stand a chance.. All you have to do is suck power off a backplane, or just rig it. I seem to recall you could leave them running when taking the system down for diag, so long as system power wasn't cycled, so the keybd and mouse hooks aren't relied upon nor even expected all of the time.

The newer ones use firmware and a host driver to emulate the primary IDE/SCSI device. How their scheme works precisely is beyond me.. One thing I remember that was funny about the old ones; You couldn't touch the card's drive images unless the card was running, and it was treated just like another device even though it was not much more than a raw file on the HD.. So I'm guessing you basically have a pair of incestous HAL, on in firmware in the card, one in software on the host playing games on who is going to what. The host's first driver playing read-write for buffered FS data like a overglorified HDC so the host didn't have to know about the FS, and the card providing raw data to the host's (logically) second driver from a firmware cheat like another giant HDC, but doing it directly from a read handed to it by the host...

I'd say no go, sorry.

Re:I can't sell them!

[stilwebm]

Sell them and use the proceeds to buy office property that the office can use. Preferably something with educational (read: hack) value.

Re:???

[Robbat2]

nope, that would give a perfectly logical error:
bash: /dev/brain: Permission denied
This brain is permissioned as read-only.
You actually expect to teach an old dog new tricks?

ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."

Ideas...

[kireK]

With the older cards you could buy a PCI bus extender and use it to start the basics for a PC. Add a PCI video card and use the onboard IDE. Works OK from my past experiance. With the newer cards ( No IDE onboard) you are SOL.. sorry... On the bright side, you can always put them into a Sun PCI machine (Ultra5 works great) and run it there... works great as a firewall if you do not want to put ipfilter on Solaris. Or, a GREAT way to mess with the NT guys in your office... "Heu guys look, Sun now has an exchange server..."

Re:Imagine

[The_Dougster]

Yeah, I have a few spare PCI slots. Wonder if you could plug them into a PC? Why then I'd simply hack Hurd's GnuMach microkernel to take advantage of them, and my new .NOT server would easily take over the world! Muahahah...