Information on Power Series and Personal Irises

[Jim Barton]

In article <8811241934.AA22154 at caboto.dgp.toronto.edu>, ian at dgp.toronto.edu ("Ian S. Small") writes:

> 1) What make of SMD disk controller and SMD disks does SGI supply with the
>    Power Iris?  We are naturally interested in going the third party route
>    for these components.  Our preferred controllers and disks are the Ciprico
>    32xx and Fujitsu M23xx lines.

We use the Xylogics 754 4-channel SMD controller.  The disks are CDC
(imprimus) Sabre 1.2GB 24MHz drives.  Any other disks and controllers are your
problem, not ours.

> 2) What do the memory board modules look like on the Power Iris?  Is there
>    a chance of purchasing the memory add-ons from a third party vendor
>    such as Clearpoint, Helios, Parity, etc.?  This is possible with Suns
>    and Mac II's and so on because of the generic SIMMs being used - is
>    it the case with the new Iris?

The memory modules are custom to interact properly with the ECC circuitry.
Parity memories, such as you mentioned, simply won't work.  They also
are wider than what you are used to (32 bits).

> 3) The same memory board module question applies for Personal Irises - what
>    does the 8 MB memory increment look like?

You'll have to get a Personal IRIS expert to answer this.

> 4) Has anybody tried running an SMD disk controller out of the single VME
>    'slot' on a Personal Iris?  Is it possible?  How fast is it?

While not verifed by us, there is no known reason this shouldn't work, it
simply doesn't pay for us to do it.  The software is the same, and the
VMEBus interface fast enough that you'll be worrying about the drive/controller,
not the VMEBus speed.

> 5) Is there any way to get access to the SCSI bus in a Personal Iris?
>    There didn't seem to be an *external* connector, which begs the
>    question of whether there's an *internal* one hiding in there somewhere.

You haven't looked carefully.  There is indeed an external SCSI connector, 
right next to the serial ports.

> 6) Does anybody have any experience with plugging arbitrary VME boards into
>    the 4D line?  If it works on a MIPS, is it likely to work on a 4D?

Lots of third party boards have been successfully installed in 4D machines.
Of course, for a MIPS based board, if your driver is SysV flavor, it ought to
work without too much effort.  A UMIPSBSD driver may be harder to port.

> Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
> -- 
> 
> Ian S. Small                      Dynamic Graphics Project
> 				  Computer Systems Research Institute
> 				  University of Toronto
> (416) 978-6619			  Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4


-- Jim Barton
Silicon Graphics Computer Systems    "UNIX: Live Free Or Die!"
jmb at sgi.sgi.com, sgi!jmb at decwrl.dec.com, ...{decwrl,sun}!sgi!jmb
--