C
Chris Jones
Hi all,
I have access to, and the opportunity to play with, (though not at present
ownership of) a large number of no-longer-required SunPCI cards. The model
is Penguin, Bios V1.1.2 441B. These are basically an AMD x86 PC on a PCI
card which plugs into the bus of a SPARC based sun workstation, to allow
Sun users to run M$ windows / PC programs without getting a separate box,
power supply, hard drive, network connection etc. The card has a 400MHz
AMD cpu, 2 DIMM banks, its own graphics chipset (SiS 5598), W48C67 clock
generation, ESS1869F audio chip, Winbond W83877TF peripherals, it has
USB1.1 I think, some slightly modified Award bios, a PIC16C64A programmed
by Sun, AFAIK to emulate a keyboard and mouse (to get the input from the
Sun keyboard and mouse and to provide this to the PC by emulating the
hardware. The sticker on the PIC says MSKB 18 (c)1998), and it has an intel
21554 PCI bus bridge, to allow the Sun to access the PC memory I think, (or
vice versa?) which allows the PC to render its screen inside a window on
the sun desktop, although there is the option to use the internal graphics
hardware on the SunPCI card and the VGA connector on the card edge. The
card seems to also have an IDE interface though the connector has not been
soldered on since the normal usage is to access the a file on the Sun hard
drive via some software on the Sun CPU over the PCI bus bridge somehow.
Anyhow, what I would like to be able to do is to make the card boot without
the Sun workstation attached. It would be a nice little linux PC with only
25W maximum power consumption, and has USB so keyboard and mouse, network
and possibly even hard drive etc. could be attached, and could be used as a
VOIP box or for web browsing or whatever.
Just applying power doesn't seem to do it - I tried plugging it into the PCI
bus of an old PC and the fan worked but nothing else. I think either: the
PIC microcontroller or the Intel bus bridge IC might be holding the SunPCi
in reset, or the modified bios on the SunPCi card might be unwilling to
boot without some words of encouragement from a genuine Sun workstation, or
something I haven't thought of.
If I plug it into the Sun machine and run the software on the SPARC cpu that
tells the SunPCI to boot, then from what I remember, the internal video
port of the SunPCI does become active and shows some text whilst the bios
boots properly and then when Win98 runs off the emulated hard drive, the
video is switched over to the window on the Sun desktop, so if it were
possible to boot the SunPCi without the Sun then I ought to see something
on the video port.
I considered trying to find out about an open-source bios which could
replace the one on the board but it looks to me like these open BIOSs are
only available for specific motherboards.
These cards are sitting in a pile at work and are causing me great anguish
because I can see that they are basically complete low power PCs and they
will sit there forever gathering dust unless I figure out how to persuade
them to boot. Has anyone else played with one of these? (or ideally I'd
love it if one of the designers were lurking here and could give me a quiet
hint...)
Chris
I have access to, and the opportunity to play with, (though not at present
ownership of) a large number of no-longer-required SunPCI cards. The model
is Penguin, Bios V1.1.2 441B. These are basically an AMD x86 PC on a PCI
card which plugs into the bus of a SPARC based sun workstation, to allow
Sun users to run M$ windows / PC programs without getting a separate box,
power supply, hard drive, network connection etc. The card has a 400MHz
AMD cpu, 2 DIMM banks, its own graphics chipset (SiS 5598), W48C67 clock
generation, ESS1869F audio chip, Winbond W83877TF peripherals, it has
USB1.1 I think, some slightly modified Award bios, a PIC16C64A programmed
by Sun, AFAIK to emulate a keyboard and mouse (to get the input from the
Sun keyboard and mouse and to provide this to the PC by emulating the
hardware. The sticker on the PIC says MSKB 18 (c)1998), and it has an intel
21554 PCI bus bridge, to allow the Sun to access the PC memory I think, (or
vice versa?) which allows the PC to render its screen inside a window on
the sun desktop, although there is the option to use the internal graphics
hardware on the SunPCI card and the VGA connector on the card edge. The
card seems to also have an IDE interface though the connector has not been
soldered on since the normal usage is to access the a file on the Sun hard
drive via some software on the Sun CPU over the PCI bus bridge somehow.
Anyhow, what I would like to be able to do is to make the card boot without
the Sun workstation attached. It would be a nice little linux PC with only
25W maximum power consumption, and has USB so keyboard and mouse, network
and possibly even hard drive etc. could be attached, and could be used as a
VOIP box or for web browsing or whatever.
Just applying power doesn't seem to do it - I tried plugging it into the PCI
bus of an old PC and the fan worked but nothing else. I think either: the
PIC microcontroller or the Intel bus bridge IC might be holding the SunPCi
in reset, or the modified bios on the SunPCi card might be unwilling to
boot without some words of encouragement from a genuine Sun workstation, or
something I haven't thought of.
If I plug it into the Sun machine and run the software on the SPARC cpu that
tells the SunPCI to boot, then from what I remember, the internal video
port of the SunPCI does become active and shows some text whilst the bios
boots properly and then when Win98 runs off the emulated hard drive, the
video is switched over to the window on the Sun desktop, so if it were
possible to boot the SunPCi without the Sun then I ought to see something
on the video port.
I considered trying to find out about an open-source bios which could
replace the one on the board but it looks to me like these open BIOSs are
only available for specific motherboards.
These cards are sitting in a pile at work and are causing me great anguish
because I can see that they are basically complete low power PCs and they
will sit there forever gathering dust unless I figure out how to persuade
them to boot. Has anyone else played with one of these? (or ideally I'd
love it if one of the designers were lurking here and could give me a quiet
hint...)
Chris
