Another avenue of Sbus machine testing could be the old Enterprise
Server range such as the E4500 which was very popular, and last time I
checked (about a year ago) is still in use at a number of customer
sites. These are (mostly) SBus-based, and IIRC, have a hme port on each
I/O board. They would certainly accept the SBus version of the qfe card.
I'm not sure whether we produced SBus hme cards or not.
Regards,
Brian
James Legg wrote:
Hi Garret,
I could find you an Ultra 10 with onboard hme in our lab and arrange
remote access if you needed something to test on if that is any use?
I think the last couple of Ultra 2s we keep around are in cold storage
these days, but I might be able to dig one out and a card perhaps as
well.
Let me know this would be helpful.
-James
Garrett D'Amore wrote:
Earlier this week I got yet another request for qfe support for x86
systems. I get these requests fairly periodically. I guess there
are a lot of 4-port qfe cards still out there.
This last one finally gave me the impetus to do the work to do the
port. What I want to do is poll the community on this, because I'm
going to need help:
1) testing -- my last SPARC system with onboard hme died a while back
2) testing -- I have no sbus hme ports -- a Sun Ultra 2 or some
other system with sbus qfe or sunswift would be helpful here.
3) review -- as part of this effort I've removed all the legacy
dvma and on-demand DMA resource allocation, and replaced it with a
very simple "preallocated" DMA region/bcopy -- this is typical for
most simple 1G and slower ethernet NICs today. (This eliminated
about 1000 lines from the driver.)
4) perf. testing -- the above changes "potentially" have
performance impact. I think on any supported CPU that these cards
run on, the simplifications will greatly outweigh the savings
formerly afforded by the "private" dvma interface this driver used to
use
Now, the good news is that the entire effort here has only taken me a
few hours. But I figure if I can help out some of these folks with
those older qfe cards, its probably worth it. And the simplification
in the code, and getting one closer to elimination of the "private"
dvma interface is IMO a worthy goal.
I'd also like to convert this driver (and also eri and dmfe) to
support Brussels. If some enterprising community member wants to
help out, let me know.
-- Garrett
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Brian Ruthven Sun Microsystems UK
Solaris Revenue Product Engineering Tel: +44 (0)1252 422 312
Sparc House, Guillemont Park, Camberley, GU17 9QG
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