[rescue] SBusFPGA update: USB Host, 256 MiB DDR3 RAM disk, ... (Was: Re: A SBus card for SPARCstation designed in 2020...)

[Richard]

Agreed, spectacular work. If you are thinking of making a small run available
at some point I for one would be very interested.

Keep us posted!

Sent from my iPhone

> On 23 Aug 2021, at 01:41, Joshua D. Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:
>
> o;?On August 22, 2021 9:03:51 AM EDT, Romain Dolbeau <romain at dolbeau.org>
wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Following up on a previous post...
>>
>> Le sam. 12 dC)c. 2020 C  19:12, Romain Dolbeau <romain at dolbeau.org> a
C)crit
>> :
>>> Following up on my own idea, this might interest some people on these
>> lists:
>>> Le jeu. 17 sept. 2020 C  15:29, Romain Dolbeau <romain at dolbeau.org> a
> C)crit
>> :
>>>> The motivation - I'm kind of wondering how much efforts it would take
>>>> to put a modern [not-so-]small FPGA on a SBus card
>>
>> The current status is visible in the repository
>> <https://github.com/rdolbeau/SBusFPGA> (and a picture on Reddit
>>
<https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/p98pl1/sparcstation_20_w
> i
>> th_fpgabased_256_mib_ddr3_ram/>).
>>
>> The completely re-written gateware includes a 256 MiB RAM disk (for
>> e.g. fast swap) and USB OHCI host controller. It only took 23 years to
>> get USB 1.1 on a SPARCstation :-) (and the hardware needs a redesign,
>> as there's no proper connector in the current version, the picture
>> shows the ugly truth). Still working on crypto, but this time with an
>> elliptic curve 25519 engine (for e.g. ssh handshake), and the SW side
>> is still the primary issue... The micro-sd could be supported in HW
>> with the Litex gateware, but the specific driver would need porting
>> from Linux to NetBSD (unlike USB OHCI which only needed the SBus ->
>> OHCI shim, the OHCI driver is NetBSD's stock one, and having USB mass
>> storage support makes the micro-sd less critical).
>>
>> There's no boot support for USB; there's a stack available in Forth
>> for recent versions of OpenFirmware but it won't work on an OpenBoot
>> 2.x system like the SS20 (and I couldn't figure out how to make it
>> work/backport).
>>
>> #####
>> (dolbeau)ss20:~> cpuctl identify 0
>> cpu0: mid 8: TI,TMS390Z55 @ 60 MHz, on-chip FPU
>> cpu0: physical 20K instruction (64 b/l), 16K data (32 b/l), 1024K
>> external (32 b/l): cache
>> enabled
>> cpu0: SPARC v8
>> (dolbeau)ss20:~> cpuctl identify 1
>> cpu1: mid 10: TI,TMS390Z55 @ 60 MHz, on-chip FPU
>> cpu1: physical 20K instruction (64 b/l), 16K data (32 b/l), 1024K
>> external (32 b/l): cache
>> enabled
>> cpu1: SPARC v8
>> (dolbeau)ss20:~> usbdevs
>> addr 1: OHCI root hub, NetBSD
>> addr 2: USB 2.0 Hub, vendor 1a40
>> addr 3: PS/2+USB Mouse, vendor 04f3
>> (dolbeau)ss20:~> swapctl -l
>> Device               512-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Priority
>> /dev/sbusfpga_sdram0     524288        0   524288     0%    0
>> #####
>> (the intermediate USB Hub supplies the needed VBus as I don't have
>> power management on the board).
>
>
> Your work on this is very exciting.
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