[SunRescue] SS2 usefulness (waz: 5 major manufacturers?)

[jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.comjwbirdsa]

   My disk is a:

sd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: <SEAGATE, ST11200N, 9300> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd0: 1005MB, 1872 cyl, 15 head, 73 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2059140 sectors

So, even though the 3/60 obviously isn't running SCSI-2 or Fast or anything
like that, the disk itself is probably faster. This morning, I ftp'ed a
3+ megabyte file to it at 205K/sec. Reads are faster.

>wrote the dma mode on the linux SCSI driver with absoultely no docs

   Gotta hate that. I'm looking at trying to port Minix to my Sun-2's
next year with a spotty set of docs. A couple of critical drivers are going
to have to be written by cribbing from other OSes, such as the Ethernet
driver, which I should be able to crib from the Linux/*BSD ie1 drivers
since the VME Ethernet board is just the Multibus Ethernet board in a
straightforward VME-Multibus converter frame.
   (Why Minix? Because I have neither docs on the Multibus SCSI/Serial board
nor anybody else's code to look at. Ergo, no SCSI disk. I might be able
to kluge together a driver for the XY440 SMD controller by looking at
existing 450/451 drivers, but I don't have enough boards or disks to go
around, so I need diskless operation. Judging by the agonizing difficulties
that a diskless NetBSD Sun-3 with 8M RAM has, a Sun-2's 7M max just isn't
going to cut it, and I can't max out every one of my Sun-2's with memory
anyway. On the other hand, Minix thinks that even 4M is a LOT of memory!
And there have been web servers and such written for Minix, so a
Minix-based Sun-2 would be able to do something useful.)

   --James B.