Hi,
[....]
> Does the firmware need to run to make the card work however ? Thats a
> problem on some other raid cards that prevents them running on non x86
> platforms
That is something, I honestly don't know. I've asked on the debian-alpha
mailing-list first and did not get any explanatory response. I've checked
the card in a x86-machine ( just to very it's working and to configure
RAID drives ). In this machine, the card posts a banner, saying it's
a Mylex and - depending on the BIOS enable/disable setting - posting
some keypress options to start the build-in firmware.
That i don't see on my alpha, which does not necessarily mean something.
The SRM firmware contains a small x86-emulator, being capable to at
least run the POST-routines of normal PCI cards. AFAIK, this emulator
works on a lot of cards, but is not capable of doing any screen/terminal
I/O. For example, if you use Matrox vga cards ( quite common on alphas )
you get a working grafics device, but yoy won't see any matrox banner
on the screen. Newer firmware's even support a "run_bios" command,
that allows to start configuration routines, like the RAID setup.
Unfortunately, a version of this newer firmware does not exist for
my machine.
Mylex OEM'd some earlier DAC-models to DEC for use as a RAID
controller. These came with their own firmwaer, which allowed ppl
to setup logical RAID-drives. I can't tell, if the firmware handles any
other POST stuff.
The controller comes with a SA-110 processor running it's own firmware.
I would assume, that the SA-110 handles POST - but that's honestly
just a wild guess.
Regards,
T.weyergraf
-- Thomas Weyergraf kirk@colinet.de My Favorite IA64 Opcode-guess ( see arch/ia64/lib/memset.S ) "br.ret.spnt.few" - got back from getting beer, did not spend a lot.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Nov 23 2002 - 22:00:27 EST