[rescue] KVM and Sunfire 280r

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 08:20:34PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> 
> > Numerous people have put framebuffers and consoles on Cray's before.
> > Reportedly, even Apple has done it.  So why not the E10k?  Presumably
> > there is no other way ot get graphics out of the system than by a card
> > on the system bus, and if you have a fb in the machine, why not a
> > keyboard and mouse?
> 
> Because graphics heads do not belong on servers.  Even SGI knows that.
> You can't toss a head on a Challenge XL without a great deal of work.
> Servers are NOT workstations.  They have consoles.  These consoles are
> for installing the OS, performing emergency maintenance, and monitoring
> hardware--not for showing pretty pictures.

But, what if you want to use the machine for a large maspar workstation
for some project that requires more video bandwidth than HIPPI allows.

I though that all you needed to toss a head onto a Challenge XL was
their GUI-Extreme board for Challenges, and didn't require a backplane
and power supply change like the RE and IR options did.  I've seen the
board, but I can't seem to google much on it at this moment.  I seem to
recall that it was a set of extreme cards in a GIO->ebus adapter.