PCI DSSI adapters; was [Re: FA: DEC RF-71 Disk Drive]

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 10:53:24AM -0800, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> At 11:12 AM -0500 3/18/06, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> >On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 03:41:57AM -0500, 9000 VAX wrote:
> >> On 3/18/06, Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > So this is an official DEC product? KFPSA?
> >> > Which modern PC-based *nix does this work on? Linux, *BSD?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> They were made for Alpha computers, which use PCI bus, I believe.
> >
> >Of course, they're PCI, that's right in the subject.  But what
> >OS has drivers for these things?
> >
> >I guess VMS probably does, and maybe Tru64... anything else?
> 
> I'm guessing that the only other OS that *might* support them would 
> be NetBSD, though that seems a little doubtful.
> 
> I think this is the first I've ever heard of a PCI DSSI controller, 
> and I'm a little surprised that such a thing exists.  The other 
> odd-ball one would be the PCI CI controller, the thing is, that a CI 
> controller makes far more sense.  All DSSI talks to is a few hard 
> drives, and tape drives.  I don't think it can be used as a cluster 
> interface (if it did the controller would make sense), so why bother.

Sure it was, or at least the installation manuals Digital had for
MicroVAXes with DSSI described how to cluster pairs of VAXes with it,
either for the MicroVAX 3x00 QBUS machines that had DSSI on their CPU
board, or VAX 4000/[2-7]00's

Pat
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