[9fans] Re: Thinknic and plan9

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

In article <slrn9h01d5.in7.randolph@panix3.panix.com> you write:
>I ran across this inexpensive little diskless (it has a CD-ROM) x86
>box at www.thinknic.com and I think might make an excellent Plan 9
>terminal.  Has anyone tried it?

Hmm, I started looking into this more, because such things interest
me.  The thing is certainly cheap ($199, plus shipping and tax).
Unfortunately, most of the hardware is unsupported.  Well, okay, just
about everything is unsupported.

The ethernet chip is, I believe, an SiS900.  A Plan 9 driver doesn't
exist for this specific chip; I don't know if any of the existing
drivers would run it.  However, a data sheet on the chip is available
from the SiS web site, and there are Linux and BSD drivers from which
to build.  I'll see if I can't get something going.

The video chip is an SiS5597/98.  I know nothing about it, except that
apparantly it only has 512K of RAM on it.  XFree86 seems to have a
driver for it (complete with acceleration and the whole bit), but
that's about all I know.  The 512KB of RAM is a little confusing; it
doesn't seem like enough to run it at the resolution and color depth
stated on the thinknic web page; maybe it steals RAM from the host.  I
don't know.  I couldn't find a data sheet on it, but I didn't look that
hard.

The audio chip is a C-Media device (CMI8738) which also drives the
modem.  I can't imagine that it's supported, but again, a Linux driver
exists.  I haven't even attempted to look for a data sheet.

Other devices in the box are an SiS 7001 USB controller (unsupported),
and an SiS 85C5513 IDE controller.  I don't know much about the IDE
controller, or its software interface, so I can't say wether or not
it's supported.  The device also has a CD-ROM and a 4MB IDE flash
disk.  Yes, that's four megabytes; I gather they only support using it
to hold things like netscape bookmarks, etc.  It'd certainly be big
enough to hold a Plan 9 kernel and bootstrap.

I gather that the thing uses the CD-ROM for booting and housing the
operating system (Linux).  Booting off of the flash would free that up,
and make it useful for other stuff.  If one could access the flash as a
normal, if somewhat small, IDE device, and the IDE controller is
supported, then that more or less takes care of that problem.

Apparantly, some people have had success with putting laptop hard
drives into these units, but it involves hardware hacking.

Since they're so cheap, I decided to ship eatting out for the next few
days and order one.  It should be here on the 6th of June.  In the mean
time, I'll try and build device drivers for the ethernet and video
chips; maybe I'll have something ready for testing by the time the unit
gets here.

btw- I think that the addition of yet another SB-incompatable audio
chip to the mix underscores the need to divorce the kernel and external
audio interfaces from the soundblaster family.  Having a modularized
framework for audio devices, much the way the current ethernet
interface has been modularized, and moving towards a standard such as
PCM for transfer of audio data into and out of the kernel, would be a
good step towards doing that.

	- Dan C.