Ultra 1 support

[Marius Strobl]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 11:38:58AM +0100, Gheorghe Ardelean wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > I have been looking to install free-bsd on my Ultra 1 Creator, but on
> > the unsupported machines is listed the Ultra 1, however the 'Ultra 1E'
> > is listed as supported. What is the 'E' version? I have never heard of
> > such, it is the Creator?
> 
> Ultra 1E is definitely supported (to some extent also a plain Ultra1). It
> has an 100BaseTX hme(4) Ethernet interface (while the plain Ultra 1 has
> an 10BaseT interface which is not yet supported). Ultra 1E has also a
> Creator frame buffer which is supported by FreeBSD. IIRC E in 1E comes
> from Enterprise version!
> 
> There is an easy way to recognize an 1E from plain Ultra 1 by looking at
> the Ultra 1 logo plate on the case. On 1E the number 1 is written in a red
> circle while on plain ultra 1 is written in some sort of teal circle.
> 
> To summarize:
> 
>  -on 1E we support the onboard disk controller + onboard ethernet
> 
>  -on plain Ultra 1 we support ONLY the onboard esp(4) diskcontroller
>   and one has to use a specially build loader (without gzip
>   support -- for more on this please read this list's archives).
>   (at least this apply for 6.0-RELEASE)

A fix/workaround for the underlying problem was commited some time
ago and MFC'ed to RELENG_6 on November 30th so the December 6.0
and 7.0 snapshots should boot just fine from stuff attached to
the on-board ESP in U1.
I also did a driver for the on-board Ethernet NIC, with some luck
it'll be in 6.1.

> 
> To make also a plane Ultra1 useful one has to give it 1E "flavors" by
> installing an SBUS hme interface (this is what I have done to mine) and
> eventually an SBUS Creator Card.

AFAICT there's no such thing like a SBus Creator card, all have
UPA connectors (which come in two different shapes) and U1 don't
have UPA slots. Actually I think the only graphics cards supported
in U1 are the TGX and TGX+ variants of the CG6 familiy, at least
the GX and GX+ ones are electrically incompatible with SBus in U1
and you also can't plug the latter into a U1 unless using a saw
(that's probably also true for the other SBus graphics cards built
for the sun4u predecessor).  I hope to have a driver for the CG6
ready for 6.2.

Marius

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