[rescue] The Practical Guide to FDDI

[Jochen Kunz]

On 2003.03.28 00:01 jwbirdsa at picarefy.com wrote:

> For those of you who know FDDI: what technical mistakes have I made?
Only one, as far as I can see:
The DEFZA is a Turbochannel card. I have one. It is the predecessor of
the DEFTA. From NetBSDs src/sys/dev/tc/tcdevs:
device  PMAF-AA         fza     DEC FDDIcontroller 700 (DEFZA; fiber
optic)
All DEF[QTEP]A cards use the same "PDQ" engine with different bus
attachments. (Easy to see by diging into the NetBSD code for this
cards.)

Some notes:

I have a SGI Personal Iris 4D35 with a VME FDDI card. I got the machine
that way, so I think this config is supported by SGI / IRIX.
Unfortunately the PSU of that machine is broken, so I can not do any
benchmarks. This SGI VME FDDI card is a OEM version of the Interphase
Peregrin 4211. SGI made some changes (read bugfixes) to the hardware and
wrote a new firmware to get more throughput out if this thing. A stock
4211 will not work with IRIX, you need the SGI version.

There are SunOS 4.x m68k and SPARC drivers for the Interphase Peregrin
4211 and 5211. I saw them somewhere when I looked for infos about the
SGI 4211 derivate.

Concentrators and cards from SysKonnect are quite common too, at least
in .de. The SysKonnect cards are available in SAS (SC, MIC, RJ45), DAS
(SC, RJ45), 32 bit / 33 MHz and 64 bit 66 MHz PCI, EISA and ISA(!). They
still sell the PCI cards and thay have drivers for several Win*
versions, Linux, AIX, Solaris, UnixWare, ... This cards are "Deutsche
Wertarbeit". (i.e. good) Look at http://www.syskonnect.de/

My RS/6000 MCA FDDI card is FRU 93F0377. My HP EISA FDDI card is laled
J2156. I haven't used them yet.

A friend has a 3COM concentrator (forgot model name) and is very
satisfied with it.

Also: You can connect a S port to a A or B port. It will work in
degenerate mode. I.e. you can break up a DAS ring and connect a SAS
station at each end. (Had to do this when I got only SAS cards for
speciffic machines.)

BTW: If anyone has docs for the DEFQA, please share them with me. I am
willing to write the NetBSD bus attachment for it. FDDI on a QBus VAX
running NetBSD would be really cool.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/