[SunRescue] How FAST is a SUN IPC

[Fleet Captain Druaga]

My apologies once again - I was speaking from my own experience.

Thanks for the offer of help.  I will probably be setting up the Sparc 2
with a Weitek 80mhz here soon and would like to get two frame buffers
running on it so we'll have to talk when that gets going.

Oh - I oopsed when I mentioned netBsd.org and bnetd.org   I'm not running
those domains but that's what's running on the dedicated Battlenet servers.
I apologize if anyone was confused.

Sincerely,

Mike Hebel

> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
> >Behalf Of Dave McGuire
> >Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 8:00 PM
> >To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> >Subject: RE: [SunRescue] How FAST is a SUN IPC
> >
> >
> >On July 6, Fleet Captain Druaga wrote:
> >> I know from experience that you can't use two _separate_ frame
> >buffers in an
> >> IPC.  You can however discount the integrated BW frame buffer
> >if you have
> >> another one installed as the SBUS one "should" take over control of the
> >> video. However I have heard of people using more than one SBUS
> >frame buffer
> >> in Sparc 1 and above systems.
> >
> >  My intention is not to argue with you...but this is definitely
> >incorrect.  The onboard framebuffer sits on the sbus in a "virtual"
> >(electrical) sense, even though it's not a separate card with an sbus
> >connector.  The cards coexist with their own address spaces, and it's
> >up to the operating system's device drivers to properly probe &
> >initialize them upon boot.
> >
> >  Laziness prevents me from actually doing it, but I was originally
> >going to prove a point by driving to my friend's house a few miles
> >from here and replying to this email on his IPC that has three
> >monitors on it. :)
> >
> >  I might respectfully suggest that your machine, if it didn't behave
> >correctly with multiple heads, might have been misconfigured or had
> >some sort of weird revision conflict.  If you want to hack on this
> >again at some point, I'd be happy to help you track down what was
> >preventing your other framebuffer from operating.
> >
> >  What does happen here, though, which can be confusing at first, is
> >that the onboard framebuffer is in a "higher numbered" sbus slot, in
> >the virtual sense...any framebuffers in "lower" numbered slots
> >(i.e. any of the real, physical sbus slots) will override it FOR THE
> >BOOT ROM OUTPUT and bootup messages and such.  The boot rom will use
> >the first framebuffer it finds and recognizes for its output if it is
> >configured to use a framebuffer instead of a serial console.
> >
> >> They're also good for dedicated uses.  For instance I have two
> >running at
> >> separate houses running NetBSD (www.netbsd.org) and bnetd
(www.bnetd.org)
> and doing fine as standalone Battlenet(tm) servers for local LAN games.
> (The bnetd source took me about 2 hours to make and compile on the
> IPC(25mhz) compared to about 45 minutes on a faster IPX(40mhz))

  Quite true...unless there are folks here who have much better
connectivity than I do, in the case of network services provided to
the outside world, the bottleneck will *always* be the leased line.
Always.  All but the oldest of SPARC machines can saturate a 10mbps
ethernet all by themselves.


             -Dave McGuire
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