From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David S. Miller" Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 06:38:56 +0000 Subject: Re: Ultra AXmp Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ultralinux@vger.kernel.org Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 02:27:27 -0400 From: Qiru Zhou I am not sure what other PC PCI card that I can put there. We have SGI O2s with PCI slots. But I almost cannot put any PCI card from retail store, since it is not compatible with O2 or there is simply no driver for it (you may develop your own, if you really want.). Whats the problem? I have off the shelf 3com and Tulip PCI ethernet cards, and off the shelf Adaptec and NCR scsi cards, in my UltraSPARC PCI systems here. (I've also played around with a Matrox M-II card in them as well) In fact one of my PCI Ultra's is a router into a test subnet I have, using a 4-port Tulip card. Just about any existing Linux PCI driver can be made to work in about 15 minutes of hacking done by one of the developers who work on the port. All your "open architecture" claims are false as well, you can get complete documentation on Sun's bus, cpu, and device programming interfaces on the PCI Ultra's and timing specs are available as well. As far as I've seen, any PCI card I've thrown into one of my Ultra's was found on the bus and would work just fine once I did the driver porting work. The only part where anything is problematic is where a card has complex x86 firmware, and this matters really only for a device which you'd like to boot off of. But all the Ultra/PCI systems have on board bootable devices with open-firmware on them so it's a non-issue. So don't give the PCI Ultra's and the O2's a bad rap just because the support list Solaris and IRIX have are so small for off the shelf PC cards. It is not an indication of a sub-standard PCI bus implementation at all, it's just plain lack of OS support from these vendors, no more no less. Later, David S. Miller davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com