[Suns-at-Home] Ultra 10 IDE

[Michael-John Turner]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 06:11:55PM +1100, Eric Rudolph Pizzani wrote:
> I was wondering, is there anyway, anyway at all of fixing the  
> performance flaws of the Ultra 10's IDE?

Not AFAIK, no - it's just plain broken. You may be able to get the PROM to
boot from a PCI IDE card, but I've not tried it myself. The card would also
have to be supported by whatever OS you're using - the open source OSes
would certainly work, but I'm not sure about Solaris. See
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/faq.html#pci-cards for details.

> Failing that, how does one reflash a SCSI card so it can be used on a  
> SPARC machine? I've got cards intended for an Alpha and for an x86  
> (Adaptec).

I've read various stories about a near mythical Adaptec 294x-based card
with OpenBoot support, but I've not seen any confirmation from anyone who's
ever got one working in a Sun (I think the card was designed for Mac
systems).

By far the easiest approach is to get a SCSI card with the Symbios/LSI
Logic 875 chipset - it's supported by the PROM, so you'll be able to boot
from it, etc. Any PCI card will do - OpenBoot contains support for the
chipset and the PC BIOS is ignored. I have one such card in my Ultra 10 and
it works like a charm with NetBSD.

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner | http://mjturner.net/
mj@turner.org.za    | Open Source in WC ZA - http://www.clug.org.za/