[SunRescue] Silly Question.

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Jeff wrote:

> I'm not too sure if this will work, as I'm not familiar at all with the
> workings of the PCi card, but you should be able to flsh the bios to use
> faster processors.  My friend has an old K6-2 300 and when he bought it
> I think he could maybe have gone to 350, but after he flashed it, he
> could go up to the latest and greatest K6-3.  As far as I know, these
> boards are a full computer, so they should have a real bios as well. 
> Mabey they don't because they don't have an onboard IDE controller... 

They have a "real" BIOS, but it's one that's set up for the SunPCi.  If
the current one does not support K6-3 I doubt Sun will add support to it
unless they start shipping the boards with K6-3's.

There are also some minor board logic issues associated with changing to
the K6-3.  If the SunPCi can't handle them then it may never be possible.

What does the lack or presence of IDE have to do with a system BIOS?

> Is it possible to put a "PC" PCI card in a Sun (with the PCi card of
> course) and have Windoze see it? 

No.  This would be a major pain to implement and I doubt Sun is even
considering it.  The main market for the SunPCi is for people who need to
run normal "office" Windows apps.

> I don't understand why someone doesn't write drivers for Voodoo 2's or
> some form of "add-on" 3d accelerator.  I mean, the Linux guys did it
> with Mesa, why not try to port that to Solaris?  Then if someone did
> that, we might even see better games than Q2, like Quake 3 Arena and
> Unreal Tournament.  You can use 3dfx boards under MacOS now, and they
> were'nt made for Macs, and Sun's PCI now so why the hell not? 

Most of it is due the the lack of documentation from the vendors.  3D
graphics card vendors are notoriously tightfisted with programming
information and since there is essentially zero profit to be made by
writing drivers for "texture-blaster" cards for Solaris, driver developers
have very little leverage.

The Linux Voodoo Mesa acceleration was only made possible because a
binary-only driver was provided to developers.

PCI cards aren't "made" for anything.  With the right driver any card that
conforms to the PCI specs can be made to work.  The trick is getting the
information to build the driver.

> With all the know-how in this list I'm sure someone could pull it off!

I have hopes for some of the newer generation of cards that have more open
programming information.  nVidia looks promising at this point.

-James