Sun-3 shoeboxes on SPARCs

[Yuval Tamir]

Sun does not support the use of old Sun-3 shoeboxes on SPARCstations.
However, many people are using them successfully.  Problems occur when you
connect to the same SCSI bus a modern SCSI disk (embedded SCSI) with the
old shoeboxes (with their SCSI-ESDI converter).

One theory is that the problem is due to mixing disks which are capable of
synchronous SCSI with disks that are not.  The claim is that if the host
controller sees a sync device first (when the machine is booted), it tries
to use sync SCSI, and the old shoebox cannot handle it.

Does anybody know if this theory is correct ?

If it is, it seems that the problem could be solved by disabling sync SCSI
in the kernel.  This can be done by commenting out the SCSI_OPTIONS_SYNC
line in /sys/scsi/conf/scsi_confdata.c

I am interested in hearing from people who understand what is going on
with this and can comment on the discussion above.

If I receive useful information, I will summarize on the net.

			   Yuval Tamir

Internet: tamir at cs.ucla.edu
    UUCP: ...!{uunet,ucbvax,rutgers}!cs.ucla.edu!tamir