On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 17:19, Soren Harward wrote: > Tucker, David wrote: > > They may not be concerned about running > > Windows app (for a time, I had an SGI X86 PC that did run windows) but there > > are plenty of peripheral that run on the X86. Your SCSI card or fancy new > > video card use X86 bios code. Plug one into the PCI bus of a sparc, and you > > wont get far. The PCI card bios can be redone, but that's expensive and you > > will loose the advantages of commodity goods. > > The statement about PCI hardware being tied to he processor isn't > entirely true. There's a ton of hardware I've used in both Alpha and > x86 machines, from SCSI controllers to sound cards. Right now I have a > graphics card in my Alpha that used to be in my K6/166. There might be > some weird platform-dependent cards, but in every case I've seen, as > long as the driver compiles on the architecture, the card will work.
I second that. I have an ultrasparc 30 at work, and I plan on putting in a promise ide controller and an ide disk, since scsi are so expensive (and western digital is now selling 10k rpm enterprise-grade ide disks). Most video cards should work. Sound cards, etc. There are endian issues (With DMA and so forth), but that's largely a software issue. The driver sorts that out. Most PCI devices have no real dependency on the BIOS per se, as long as someone initializes them along the way, like the operating system. The PCI spec itself provides for a lot of the configuration. On systems that support hot-swapping the pci bus, there is no bios there at all. It's all up to the OS. Hopefully Linux will support this in 2.6. Only Solaris does currently. Michael -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
