Grex Hardware Conference

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Grex Hardware Item 38: Playing with my sun. Ramblings after not sleeping.
Entered by choke on Tue Apr 21 13:32:57 UTC 1992:

Today marks the first day that I have ever managed to get 7 megs working
on a Sun 2.  I also got the 4 meg ram card working in the same machine as
1 meg ram cards.  I had never done this before and had it not generate
a parity error every 4 or 5 minutes.

7 megs was unusual.  The machine would boot fine, but you could not reboot.
No boot commands from the prom monitor worked.
Memory bus protection error at mbio 600000. 

I took out the card that started at 600000 and it worked just fine.

I got my XY controller and mk2312ks working today.  It was a really dumb error.
As it turns out, the drive was set to drive 1 instead of drive 0, and the
second drive was not terminated properly.

I have a third drive at my storage space which I am planning to retrieve 
today after I nap.

This time I am going to experiment with suntools and the sun cgone color
card.  I have never seen suntools on a sun2 in colour.

My tape drive's drive wheel turned from rubber into chewing gum, destroying
my operating system installation tape.

Benchmarks :

        The skye board.
        The test program was a utility that plotted heat convection.

        Sun 3 / no fpu          -       60 secs.
        Sun 3 / fpu             -       20 secs.
        sun 2 / no skye board   -       360 secs.
        sun 2 / skye board      -       40 secs.


Also notice that the Sun3 is capitalized whereas the sun2 is not.

5 responses total.

#1 of 5 by steve on Tue Apr 21 15:08:53 1992:

   OK, what'dya do to get the 7M working?  Whose 1M and 4M cards?

#2 of 5 by choke on Wed Apr 22 00:44:44 1992:

A clearpoint 4 meg card, 3 'prime' memory cards (the ones with the mustard
colored capacitors on the card) and a 'prime' CPU.  (the one with a black
connector on for ttya/ttyb and mouse/keyboard.

It's humming away with 6 megs for now.
Previously I was trying to use the 4 meg card with other memory, to no avail
at all.

Steve, how are you sending your requests to suns-at-home-archives?
It doesn't seem to work for me to send multiple requests in the same body text.
Is what you got online here anywhere?
 
I am about to try a very weird experiment.
But upon further thought it may not work at all.

I was going to grab the required include /usr/sys and /lib files from here
to build a kernel on my system just to see if I could.
I am thinking that it wouldn't work because SunOs 3.0 and greater uses the
SMD disks in 'slipsector' mode which I don't know if it will work with my
1.1 format.

Official word from Fujitsu : The M2312k dissipates 140w to run.
I now have a tech reference for the M2312k.

Having documentation for SunOs 3.5, but no distribution tapes is a hassle.
For my next trick ... 
How to retrieve files from a bad QIC02 tape ?
sigh.

I wonder if my carry on luggage maximum weight would allow me to bring a 
Sun 2 to michigan to donate to grex ?  Grex could have it's own little 
network! Woo woo!

I am bringing the MT-16 card.  Is there anything else that I should be 
bringing?  More memory?  Beer?  A QIC-02 drive and tapes?

#3 of 5 by choke on Wed Apr 22 13:28:44 1992:

After limited success with 7 megs of ram, I am forced to go back to 6 megs.
There seems to be a definate particular thing going on that defeats the 
seventh meg from working correctly.  Boot reports 6e0000 megs instead of
6fffff bytes. (bytes not megs I meant.)  So apparently something like ROM
is mapped up there.
The Sun will boot with this configuration, but not reboot.  k0, and k1 both
lock up the system.  Only a k2 reset or power cycle will work.  I suspect that
the last memory board is not getting reset properly, but this is merely 
conjecture.
In any case, if it is allowed to boot multiuser it works just fine however if
it is caused a reboot (i.e. fsck on powerup changes the filesystem) the
reboot will fail with a :
Memory bus protection error at 0x600000
Which is right where the 7th meg card is.

So it works, but just barely.  Quite a high price to pay for an extra 800k.

I had to take out my 'prime' cpu card.  The cpu card had a problem where it
was possibly flexed at one time - it resets itself if it's flexed at all
and will not seat well.  I put in a 'non prime' cpu and all worked well
which led me to re-examine the memory cards which in turn revealed that I
am using all 'non-prime' Sun memory and the 4 meg card.  I was mistaken
about the vintage of my memory.  The 'tan caps' memory cards looked newer
and cleaner, but were in fact (c) 1983 sun mem cards.
The 'prime' memory cards are distinguishable by their being laid out with
ram all in one orientation.  The Sun ram cards have two blocks of chips,
one smaller than the other.
 
I am also using a different 4 meg card than I previously thought.  (I could
not check at last response as the sun was running.)
This card says : 
LCF INTERNATIONAL (c) 1985
REV C
DM2-4
It looks very nearly the same as a Sun 1 meg board.  Similar component 
placement and everything.  I suspect it's a 1 meg board reverse engineered
with a new PAL set.

I have the Sun set up as follows
Slot  P2 bus   card
----  ------   ---------------------------------------------
 1      /      Sun 1 meg ram card (0x400000)
 2      |      LCF 4 meg ram card (0x000000)
 3      |      Sun2 CPU card
 4      |      Sun 1 meg ram card (0x500000)
 5      |      empty
 6      \      Sun bwtwo video/mouse/keyboard card
 7      /      XY450 SMD controller card - REV. F (Rom rev. '@')
 8      \      Sun 1/4" tape controller card (ar) 
 9     none    SKY FFP board

As you can see, the 120 is a little cramped for space here.  I have noplace
to shove a scsi adapter without doing a big shuffle.  Not many things will
tolerate living in the same P2 bus as the CPU.

The 2/120 looks nicer from the outside than the 170, in a way.  I don't much
like it from a functional standpoint however.
It does not do as well a job as the 170 of keeping the cards ventilated.
This is mainly a problem for the real toaster elements like the cgone board
that gets hot to the touch.  I also need a fan for my SMD disks before one
of them catches fire.
There is a heat dissipation block on the SMD disk that gets so hot that it
would burn my hand.  150 degrees perhaps?  Barely in tolerance for a normal
semiconductor device in any case.  This is the dissipator for what appear 
to be a pair of SCRs that drive the spindle motor.

I may be picking up a 180 meg fujitsu today.  And if I am very lucky, a
sun 3/140.
That however is yet to be seen.

#4 of 5 by choke on Wed Apr 22 13:33:41 1992:

I installed my beloved sky board (which makes my sun almost a real computer)
and was poking around when I happened upon a directory full of compressed
files.  I issued the command to uncompress them, and the prompt came back so
soon that I thought I had done something wrong.  Apparently of all the things
that the SKY board is useful for, one very large one for me is compress/
decompress.

I will generate some benchmarks later, after I get back from property dispo.

#5 of 5 by choke on Thu Apr 23 05:34:43 1992:

A man offered me two Fujitsu M2322 (160 meg drives, SMD 8 inch) for 
$100 a piece if he didn't get a better offer soon.
I think that the 2322 will work with the 450 card I have.  The boot 
tape supports it in any case.

I think that I am goiing to install my good XY card and the screwy
(rom revision 'a') card at the same time and then copy the stupid
(the stupid was an involunary tic) operating system from my installed
drive

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