Re: Pre-compiled for VME box?

[Bill Janssen]

Kars de Jong wrote:
On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 06:05, Bill Janssen wrote:
 

I have a VME box with a MVME 162-222 and a MVME 320B-1. The 162 I
know something about but I know very little about the 320B.
The 162 does not have disk support so the 320B would have to provide the 
disk
interface.

Does the Debian distribution for the 162 have the "smarts" to interface 
with the 320 card?
   

The MVME320 is an MFM (ST506) hard disk and floppy controller, for which
no free operating system I know has any support (Debian, NetBSD,
OpenBSD).
Even if it did, I don't think you'd have much fun with it. I doubt
you'll be able to find any MFM hard disk with a reasonable size. I've
never seen any bigger than 80 MB or so. A quick Google gives a maximum
of 159MB with the Maxtor XT-2190. The card supports a maximum of 2
drives.
But like I said, there is no driver for it, nor any documentation. The
card is listed in my 1986/87 edition of the Motorola Semiconductors
"VMEmodule DATA MANUAL" but there's not much info there.
Debian (or rather the Linux kernel) doesn't support any SCSI VME cards
as far as I know.
NetBSD supports some (mostly Sun boards and a Xylogics board) and
OpenBSD supports the MVME328 SCSI controller.
Kind regards,
Kars.
Ok thanks for the info on the 320B. I thought it supported floppy drives 
and I hoped it supported
SCSI. The board has a 50 pin connector as well as the MFM connectors. 
But as I stated
I didn't know much about the card.  Oh well that card goes into the trash.

Not much point in storing the OS on my Sun box and then running the 
board from the Sun :-(

Thanks.
Bill K7NOM