Optimem 2400 WORM on Sparcstation

[Chris Johnson]

In article <10332 at brazos.Rice.edu> chris at com50.c2s.mn.org (Chris Johnson) writes:
>
>Has anyone out there gotten an Optimem 2400 WORM to work connected to a
>Sun Sparcstation?  The problem seems to be an interaction between the
>Optimem and Sun's "new" SCSA [sic] SCSI drivers or the Sun hardware.
>
>These same drives work fine with the Sun 3 series systems running
>SunOS3.5.  But connected to my Sparcstation, I get all kinds of strange
>SCSI bus data transfer and reset errors from device "esp0".

Well, I found the problems:  Optimem's SCSI interface is still grossly
outside of specification, as far as I can tell by inference.  I didn't
have a SCSI bus analyzer to check it this time, but I've reported other
such "bad" behavior to them before.  Presumably they will fix their
firmware some day soon.

In this instance, if the initiator (Sun) asks for less data than the
Optimem is interested in sending, the Optimem goes out to lunch, and
throws a lot of out-of-protocol garbage onto the SCSI bus.

Specifically, with Sun OS 4.1, the SCSA [sic] library routine scsi_slave()
does a SCSI Inquiry command for you.  Only thing is, the caller has no
control over how much data it requests, and the SCSI Inquiry command has
vendor specific quantities and values of data returned.  You can probably
see why this doesn't sit too well with the Optimem.

I've kludged around the problem for the moment.  But my wish list looks
like this:

1) It'd be nice if Optimem would get it together in their SCSI bus
   protocol firmware.

2) It'd be nice if Sun would write and provide as part of the standard OS
   release a generic, configurable SCSI device driver.  At this point, I'd
   even willing to help them figure out how to do it!

3) It'd be nice if Sun Consulting would sell products that actually
   worked, and actually had complete documentation.  I'm using the SIP driver
   as the high-level driver adjunct to the SCSA [sic] low-level routines,
   since that's the only way I'm going to talk to a "unsupported" device.  Or
   write my own driver -- and I'm sorely tempted, but I lack the time.
   Unfortunately, their software is full of bugs, and their documentation is
   incomplete.

4) As part of #3, I'd love a complete copy of Matt Jacob's "SparcStation1
   SCSI Implementation Notes", which Sun Consulting sent me all the odd pages
   from, leaving me to guess what was on the even numbered pages.  If there's
   a more up-to-date version of the "Sun Common SCSI Architecture" manual
   beyond revision 5.0, I'd love that, too.  As you might imagine, talking to
   Sun Consulting or the local Sun sales people is unproductive.

   ...Chris Johnson          chris at c2s.mn.org   ..uunet!bungia!com50!chris
 Com Squared Systems, Inc.   St. Paul, MN USA   +1 612 452 9522