john@quonset.cfht.hawaii.edu (John Kerr) (10/05/90)
Has anybody had any luck interfacing 300 &| 800 machines to
VME chasis? I would appreciate any information on the subject.
Mahalo,
jk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Kerr Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corp.
INTERNET: john@cfht.hawaii.edu
BITNET: john@uhcfht
----------------------------------------------------------------------------glen@hpfcmgw.HP.COM (Glen Robinson) (10/06/90)
John Kerr writes: >Has anybody had any luck interfacing 300 &| 800 machines to >VME chasis? I would appreciate any information on the subject. > >Mahalo, > >jk ---------- This answer only applies to 300's - I don't know about 800's. Well it depends upon what you mean by interfacing to a VME chasis. If you have your own VME chasis and you just want to pass information back and forth between the 300 and A24 space - the HP98646A card allows this with a 64K window. Caveats - no hardware vectored interrupts, character device (lseeks, reads, writes, etc.). The driver is provided by HP and you open a special device file, do ioctls, reads, writes, and closes. The ioctls include the ability to set address modifiers and to interrupt. If you want A32 access, hardware vectored interrupts, etc. Then you can use a 98577A VME Expander. This provides 4 slots, hardware vectored interrupts. Fairly large A32 address space, fairly limited A24 address space, and full A16 space. Not all address modifiers are supported, however most of the normally used ones are. This expander translates cycles between DIO and VME and allows VME master DMA to DIO. Caveats - limited power available, 4 slots, no drivers provided, i.e., you must write your own (N.B. this is a non trivial exercise). HP-UX follows Berkley 4-2 conventions (appropriate copyright/trademarks go here). If you take this route, make sure that you either buy the expander new (which will get you the latest driver development guide) or order the latest copy of this manual (98577-90011). Another caveat, Series 300 spu's have an approximate 5.0 usec watchdog timer (use 4.0 to be on the safe side) which in most cases cannot be defeated (375 is an exception, but the code access is not documented). The previous sentence alludes to the fact that if you have a sloooooow VME card you may get a bus error. Final caveat for the do your own driver folks, if you are not porting an existing driver you just might make your life easier by purchasing the following 2 items as a starter: 98577-90011 HP-UX Driver Development Guide (DDG). Note - do NOT accept anybody substituting 98577-90010 for this as it only applies to the hp-ux 6.0 release and will NOT work with later releses). 98577-66540 VME testcard - a working driver for this card is included as one of the sample drivers in the DDG. Best of luck, Glen Robinson The usual comments about not an official position of my company, etc.