Anybody ever gone to the component level to understand why this is?
The Sonnet card has a lot of extra logic on board to make it work with the six slot machines (fix the arbitration problem) and to simulate the DRTRY signal so that it will work in the Power Computing Catalyst based clones. There's no way to know what that logic does specifically, unless someone will commit espionage against Sonnet, so there isn't really any way to tell.
The "voodoo logic" (Sonnet Engineer's words) they included is almost certainly on a Programmable Logic Device and there's no way of knowing how the programmed it by looking at it. For that matter, with most PLDs, there's no way of knowing how they programmed it when you pull it off the board and test it either.
Most likely, the strange problems with the Sonnet card are caused by that "voodoo logic" in the form of unintended consequences. It could be something as simple as the Sonnet card loading a bunch of code into NVRAM at startup and not leaving room for other firmwares' needs.
Jeff Walther
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