[rescue] SATA on a SPARC (was Re: [FWIW] RaSCSI)

[Romain Dolbeau]

Le mar. 22 fC)vr. 2022 C  01:48, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> a C)crit
:

> But, in general?  I suspect not.  Lots of Suns have internal SCA bays
> and nothing but SBus for addon cards.  (I would love to be wrong about
> this; if SBus SATA cards _are_ plentiful and cheap, I would be
> delighted.)
>

Well, there weren't any SBus/SATA adapters (as I'm sure you know very
well!) any more than there were SBus/USB adapters - but now that last one
actually exists :-) [1]

The class of FPGA I use comes with 'GTP' pins that have the ability to
generate SATA-compatible signalling, and there's a basic SATA controller in
the gateware (fpga configuration) infrastructure [2].Having a bootable (the
micro-sd is already bootable in my design) SATA controller is merely a
matter of designing the adequate SBus board with the adequate FPGA [board],
and writing drivers.

Making a new board with modern components would make them 'plentiful' I
guess. But they wouldn't be 'cheap' :-(

Cordially,

Romain

[1] Blowing my own horn here: <https://github.com/rdolbeau/SBusFPGA>
[2] <https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litesata>

--
Romain Dolbeau