[rescue] 670MP windfall in the surplus diving frenzy today.....

Dave McGuire rescue at sunhelp.org
Wed Jun 20 19:35:53 CDT 2001


  It's not so much a matter of the operating system, but the windowing
system.  If a bus and a device driver are intelligently designed,
multiple instances of any device can be installed in a system, right?
Well, /dev/cgsix0, /dev/cgsix1, etc.  Now, it's just up to the
windowing system to deal with them, and X has dealt with multiple
heads since the dawn of time.

  Until I switched to an SGI Indigo2 about 1.5yrs ago, my desktop
machine has been a Sun dating back about eleven years.  The first Sbus
machine I ran on my desk was an Opus SS1+ clone back in 1992, which
had two CG3s in it.  Since then I've ALWAYS run dual heads.

         -Dave McGuire

On June 20, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> I didn't know that NetBSD did multi head stuff.
> 
> --
> Joshua Boyd
> 
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
> > On June 20, BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:
> > > OK, with some trepidation, I lugs meself away a sort of 670MP box,
> > > today, from the surplus feeding frenzy diving pit.
> > 
> >   Have no trepidation, my friend.  The 4/600 is, in my opinion, the
> > finest piece of hardware Sun has ever produced.  Run it with pride.
> > 
> > > It appears to have a Ross CYM6002K addin board of some kind (6 hat
> > > chips on it plus two surface mount chips), and is full of 501-1739
> > > ram sticks.  No cabling was present.  One drive is left, and a slow
> > > single-speed cdrom (full height) is present (will this work on my
> > > older 3/xxx machines?).
> > > 
> > > 1.  What speed/rating is this cpu?
> > 
> >   It's probably an SM100...an utter piece of trash.  Sell it on eBay
> > and pick up an SM41 for a few bucks.  It will perform much, much
> > better.  An SM100 is an early dual 40MHz cacheless processor.  An SM41
> > (also at 40MHz) will kick its ass up and down the street.
> > 
> > > 2.  What is the Ross thingie, and is it good for much?
> > 
> >   The Ross thingie is the processor module.
> > 
> > > 3.  What cable is needed to hook back up into the internal box
> > >     drive cabling system (I am assuming a small HD50 cable of
> > >     some sort.
> > 
> >   A regular HD50 cable should do the trick...the other end will need
> > to be an HD50 or a DB50 depending on the version of the box you've got.
> > 
> > > 4.  What SunOS levels will run on it, although I will probably load
> > >     up NetBSD if possible.
> > 
> >   It's a sun4m machine...I don't recall when support for them was
> > introduced, but I've run SunOS4.1.4 on lots of them.  They should also
> > run recent Solaris (up to what release I'm not sure)...but
> > NetBSD/sparc runs REALLY well on them, and is an absolute pleasure to
> > use on that hardware.
> > 
> >   Picture this.  Take that 4/600 board out of the '70 box and put it
> > into a 3-slot (4/110-style) box.  Put two CG6 framebuffers in it,
> > running to two big 20" tubes.  Pick up an SM61 and slap it on the
> > board.  Load up NetBSD.  That makes for one really nice workstation!
> > 
> >               -Dave McGuire
> > _______________________________________________
> > rescue maillist  -  rescue at sunhelp.org
> > http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> > 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue



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