Solbourne KBus VME support

VME

The VME ports on the 600, 700, and 900 (the 500 has no VME slots, but see the section on MCAB for getting one there) are all 6U form factor (Sun uses 9U in its VME systems). The VME bus is much more restrictive as well (partly due to restricted application of some of the VME signals (Bus Grants) and partly due to Solbourne specific device drivers and somewhat loose adherence to VME timing specs of some signals).

Supported VME Boards

Interphase 4207 "eagle" ethernet

click for nifty photo
The Eagle board is an intelligent ethernet card with custom ROMs. It sports a Motorola 68020 as a coprocessor to offload some of the cpu processing. Sun sold the 4207 as the NC600 (Network CoProcessor board), but you need the Solbourne "eagle" ROMs, which aren't compatible with the NC600 ROMs.

Interphase 4210/4220 "cougar" V/SCSI

Interphase 4211 "Peregrine" FDDI

Xylogics 753 SMD

The 753 VME SMD disk controller is functionally identical to the Sun 7053 controller. You can take a 753 over to a sun using a 6U->9U adapter board and it should work fine.

Note that although Sun uses the "cltr" name XD7053 in the format.dat file (whether you use sun's 7053 or a 753 in a 6U->9U adapter board), Solbourne uses XD753.

Xylogics 781 16-port MUX

click for nifty photo
The 781 is akin to the Sun ALM-2. It supports baud rates upto 38,400 and hardware flow-control. Since it's a character interrupt device, the CPU can still get bogged under heavy line input.

Features:
upto 16 async serial devices per board
upto 4 boards per system
DMA upto 10MBytes/sec
sustained async comm rates of 9600bps across all 16 channels simultaneously

Xylogics 781 Jumper descriptions
Xylogics 781 Cable Pinouts

Xylogics SV-[67]800 IPI

Solbourne modified the File System to deal with alternate sector sizes on the IPI drives. You could use 512 (default), 1024 or 2048 byte sectors. While this can substantially raise the amount of usable disk space, it can also cause problems. There were some data integrity problems in older OS revs for this (i believe 4.1A). Additionally, it means that certain tools, such as the Solbourne 'dump' program, are hacked to support the alternate sector sizes. You couldn't, for example, use a sun 'dump' program on one. CU uses a 2K sector size on our IPI drives, and they're doing just fine under OS/MP 4.1C. Remember to use the "-f 2048" flag to 'newfs' if you use the 2K sector sizes.

last modified on Thu Jul 6 16:23:42 MDT 2000

Stephen Dowdy