[rescue] Survey: what do you want in _your_ SPARC?

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Kurt Huhn wrote:

> I think FC-AL cards are needed, and firewire or USB would be very nice.  I
> wouldnt bother with A/V cards, at least for Sun - SGI and Apple have that
> market pretty well wrapped up.  Especially useful would be that ability to use
> USB or firewire hard drives, cameras, CD/DVD burners, and other stuff that
> makes using a feecee unnecessary.

Firewire and USB PCI cards are natively supported on Solaris/SPARC 8 and
above, provided they adhere to the OHCI spec.  I've been running a $20
PC-store USB card in my U30 since the days of 8-beta.

The trick is device drivers.  USB drivers exist for keyboards (usbkbm),
mice (usbms), printers (usbprn), audio devices (usb_ac) and storage
devices (scsa2usb).  Not everything works, but a reasonable sample set
does.  Of the list that you mentioned, the hole is in the cameras, and I'd
much rather support PCI capture cards (which actually have a prayer of
reasonable frame rate) for capturing live video.  For pulling stills off
of digicams, scsa2usb may work if the embedded storage complies with the
USB mass storage spec.

The provided qlc driver works fine with the Qlogic ISP220x FC cards, I was
running one in my 450 for a few months.  High end FC might be interesting
to explore.

Firewire I have little experience with.  If anyone wants to loan an OHCI
IEEE1394 card and a device to play with, I'll be happy to learn more.  :)

-James