From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dan Cross Message-Id: <200105311630.MAA23448@augusta.math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu In-Reply-To: Cc: Subject: [9fans] Re: Thinknic and plan9 Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 12:30:04 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: ab81a9c0-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 In article 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.