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  • A FPGA on a (OSH/OSS) SBus card

    From Romain Dolbeau@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 16 19:07:44 2021
    Hello,

    Maybe this will amuse some of you. Late last year I finally started on a
    crazy project of mine (Covid confinement is boring), putting a modern
    FPGA on a SBus board to add some functionalities to some trusty old SPARCstations (of course people had put FPGAs on SBus back in the day
    for various reasons, but those boards are long gone, and I wanted the
    benefits of a modern FPGA).

    Everything is open-source here:
    <https://github.com/rdolbeau/SBusFPGA>
    There's some pictures of the board in there as well.

    Hardware interface is working (the FPGA board itself is off-the-shelf,
    only the adapter board is custom), gateware & software for NetBSD 9.0 is
    an ongoing effort but the devices are recognized by the PROM and NetBSD,
    I can do some crypto, and the micro-sd card support is (slowly) moving
    forward :-)

    Cordially,

    --
    Romain

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  • From chris@21:1/5 to Romain Dolbeau on Wed Mar 17 00:56:22 2021
    On 03/16/21 18:07, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
    Hello,

    Maybe this will amuse some of you. Late last year I finally started on a crazy project of mine (Covid confinement is boring), putting a modern
    FPGA on a SBus board to add some functionalities to some trusty old SPARCstations (of course people had put FPGAs on SBus back in the day
    for various reasons, but those boards are long gone, and I wanted the benefits of a modern FPGA).

    Everything is open-source here:
    <https://github.com/rdolbeau/SBusFPGA>
    There's some pictures of the board in there as well.

    Hardware interface is working (the FPGA board itself is off-the-shelf,
    only the adapter board is custom), gateware & software for NetBSD 9.0 is
    an ongoing effort but the devices are recognized by the PROM and NetBSD,
    I can do some crypto, and the micro-sd card support is (slowly) moving forward :-)

    Cordially,


    Very good project by the sound of it. If an sd card could be made
    visible to obp as a boot disk, that would be even better. scsi drives
    are becoming an endangered species and while there are ssd type
    replacements, they are expensive. and not open source.

    Don't know where you are located, but have old sbus machines here in
    the uk if you need some test hardware access...

    Chris

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to chris on Tue Mar 16 19:09:46 2021
    On 3/16/21 6:56 PM, chris wrote:
    If an sd card could be made visible to obp as a boot disk, that would
    be even better. scsi drives are becoming an endangered species and
    while there are ssd type replacements, they are expensive. and not
    open source.

    Are you aware of the SCSI-to-SD (card) converters?

    Are you aware of the bit banging that people have done to get a
    Raspberry Pi, et al., to pretend to be an old SCSI device?



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Romain Dolbeau on Tue Mar 16 19:07:57 2021
    On 3/16/21 12:07 PM, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
    Hello,

    Hi,

    Maybe this will amuse some of you.

    It's not in my personal wheel house. But it is in the wheel house of
    multiple friends that I've shared it with on IRC and Twitter.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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  • From Romain Dolbeau@21:1/5 to chris on Wed Mar 17 08:37:21 2021
    On 3/17/21 1:56 AM, chris wrote:
    Very good project by the sound of it. If an sd card could be made
    visible to obp as a boot disk, that would be even better.

    That would be the endgame, but it's a long way away - writing a Forth
    driver doesn't look trivial. And I still need to convince NetBSD to use
    the sd-card first, and then to figure out if I can get writing to work
    (I've yet to see the FPGA write successfully to the sd-card on the
    adapter board, even using FPGA designs from real HW designers...).

    The original intent was to also have a modern video output (something
    like HDMI or DisplayPort), but that was too complex to add for my first
    PCB, so I stuck with micro-sd + internal devices.

    Don't know where you are located, but have old sbus machines here in
    the uk if you need some test hardware access...

    Thanks for the kind offer, but I have SS20s and an IPX easily accessible
    (yet to dare try the IPX!), and SS2/SS5 and an Ultra 1 that are less so
    at the moment but could expand testing eventually. Given the documented 'issues' with the SS1 SBus, I'm not sure it's ever going to be a target
    (though I do have one of unknown working status). I'm in France so UK
    has been a source of old Sun hardware in the past, it's easier to ship
    from there than from the USA.

    Cordially,

    --
    Romain Dolbeau

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  • From Romain Dolbeau@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Wed Mar 17 08:47:09 2021
    On 3/17/21 2:09 AM, Grant Taylor wrote:
    Are you aware of the SCSI-to-SD (card) converters?

    Can't answer for Chris, but my SS20 is booting from a SCSI2SD V6 and
    another one is booting from a V5 :-) They're a bit expensive for what
    they are I think, which is one of the reason I added a micro-sd slot to
    my board... and having started the work I now understand the price
    better :-)

    Are you aware of the bit banging that people have done to get a
    Raspberry Pi, et al., to pretend to be an old SCSI device?

    I wasn't aware of that, googled it and found <https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/>, an adapter board to turn a RPi into
    a SCSI device. And now I want one... Thanks for the tip!

    Cordially,

    --
    Romain Dolbeau

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  • From chris@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Wed Mar 17 13:49:49 2021
    On 03/17/21 01:09, Grant Taylor wrote:
    On 3/16/21 6:56 PM, chris wrote:
    If an sd card could be made visible to obp as a boot disk, that would
    be even better. scsi drives are becoming an endangered species and
    while there are ssd type replacements, they are expensive. and not
    open source.

    Are you aware of the SCSI-to-SD (card) converters?

    Are you aware of the bit banging that people have done to get a
    Raspberry Pi, et al., to pretend to be an old SCSI device?




    Yes, but just too expensive for my taste and budget. At 50 ukp or
    less, I might sample, but the current solution here is to use
    ex IBM server 2.5 scsi drives. Lowest cost are usually 36Gb,
    which is more than enough. Thet also fit ss20 etc directly with a
    slightly modified 3.5 -> 2.5 metal tray. Fraction of the cost
    of the sd solution as well...

    Chris

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Romain Dolbeau on Wed Mar 17 10:02:43 2021
    On 3/17/21 1:47 AM, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
    I wasn't aware of that, googled it and found https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/, an adapter board to turn a RPi into
    a SCSI device. And now I want one... Thanks for the tip!

    You're welcome.

    That's why I shared.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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