SUCCESS: Sun Blade 100 with Firewire-attached HDD (IEEE 1394)

[Marius Strobl]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 11:40:48PM +0200, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I've applied Marius Strobl's patch (posted to this list on May 15, 2005,
> see [1]) for the firewire controller used in the Sun Blade 100's against
> a 5.4R and have attached and successfully tested a HDD in an external
> Firewire enclosure the last couple of days.
> 
> Works great! Thanks Marius!

Thanks for testing :)

> 
> The FreeBSD/sparc64 5.4R Hardware Notes list this machine as "fully
> supported" (section 2.1). This seems odd to me, since it is clearly NOT
>  the case. Without this patch, the controller simply wasn't initialized
> correctly.
> 

Yeah, the sparc64 hardware notes have to be read in the context of
the time when they where written which was mainly when e.g. the
MD PCI code was fixed to work on stuff like E450 and some of the
weirder USII[e,i] based systems etc. From a today's perspective they
sound more like propaganda...
I think one actually can't call any sun4u machine "fully supported"
by FreeBSD, yet. We got closer to it over time but there are still
a few things like e.g. the EBus and SBus printer ports and all of
the floppy controllers left before some machines can be considered
"fully supported" from a hardware point of view. Of course some of
the existing drivers also still need improvement...

Marius