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

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.