[9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[northern snowfall]

Hey all,
	Does anyone have a manual for the MB86903 SPARC
CPU? I have two SPARCstation IPX with this CPU in them and
I'd love more information.

	Fujitsu isn't taking my requests seriously. I'm
pretty sure when I called the labs yesterday that the
secretary pretended to take down my phone number.

:-|

Don

http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_

Debug period.

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[Martin Harriss]

Wouldn't a SPARC achitecture manual suffice? (Mine's at work so I can't
check to see if it contains anything specific about the device in
question...)

Martin


northern snowfall wrote:
> Hey all,
>     Does anyone have a manual for the MB86903 SPARC
> CPU? I have two SPARCstation IPX with this CPU in them and
> I'd love more information.
>
>     Fujitsu isn't taking my requests seriously. I'm
> pretty sure when I called the labs yesterday that the
> secretary pretended to take down my phone number.
>
> :-|
>
> Don
>
> http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_
>
> Debug period.
>
>

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[ron minnich]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Martin Harriss wrote:

> Wouldn't a SPARC achitecture manual suffice? (Mine's at work so I can't
> check to see if it contains anything specific about the device in
> question...)

no, the arch manual is pretty useless if you're going to port an OS. That
is by design. Ask anybody who tried to get BSD on this thing (or any SPARC
for that matter) ca. 10 years ago.

ron

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[boyd, rounin]

a story i heard is that if you took a fault during a FP operation
you were in a world of pain and they Sun were not gonna tell
you how to code around it.  you needed internel sun docs/code.

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[northern snowfall]

>
>
>you needed internel sun docs/code.
>

Tee hee...

twenty# mount givingtree:/archive /mnt
twenty# cd /mnt/os/source
twenty# ls -F Solaris/. SunOS/.
Solaris/.:
2.5/ 2.6/ 2.7/ 2.8/

SunOS/.:
4.1.3/ 4.1.4/
twenty#

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[Charles Forsyth]

./sys/src/9.95/ss in /extra/sun.tgz on sources
drives the sparcstation 2 but i think it handled
some varieties of IPX as well.  if you've got a microsparc-based
Sun it will be closer to the LX/Classic, and you can get the lx.tgz
from my own web site.

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[northern snowfall]

Just kiddin ;-)

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[ron minnich]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, boyd, rounin wrote:

> a story i heard is that if you took a fault during a FP operation
> you were in a world of pain and they Sun were not gonna tell
> you how to code around it.  you needed internel sun docs/code.

or just ask about the MMU on the classic ... or ...

the list is long, Sun's attitude hard to figure out.

ron

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[northern snowfall]

> Wouldn't a SPARC architecture manual suffice? (Mine's at work so I
> can't check to see if it contains anything specific about the device
> in question...)

Yes and no. The SPARC architecture defines the generic rules
for designing a SPARCv8 implementation, but does leave much up
to the designer. For example:

    + MMU implementation can be either the SPARC reference MMU
      or an implementation of the designer's choice. The capability
      of the MMU has a huge impact on the design of supervisor code,
      obviously.

    + Ancillary registers for implementation specific functionality
      are left up to the designer as to use

    + much Coprocessor/FPU functionality is implementation dependent.
      The MB86903 has an onboard FPU, but I have no details on its
      specific capability.

There are other important facets that are implementation specific
and not bound to choices defined in the manual. Of course, the
general functionality of this SPARC CPU is v8 compatible. However,
I'd love to know what else the item is capable of. For example, the
IPX that were shipped with the Weitek CPU have an AT&T MMU on the
board. My IPX seem to have an LSI chip where the AT&T MMU should
be. I'm assuming this means the LSI WK34430P is the MMU, but I don't
know for sure. Google isn't pulling any info.

Also, this CPU is SPARCv7, which makes me even more interested in
specifics.

Don

http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_

Debug period.

Re: [9fans] Rub your feet on the carpet!

[Bruce Ellis]

I hope this is correct and useful.

       SPARCstation:   2		IPX		 ELC
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
       PROCESSOR			Fujitsu MB86903	 Fujitsu MB86903
       CPU             CY7C601		or Weitek W8701  or Weitek W8701
       CPU (clock)     40		40		 33
       FPU             TI TMS390C601A	on CPU chip	 on CPU chip
       MMU             Sun-4c		Sun-4c		 sun-4c
       Hard. Contexts  16		8		 8

other stuff at http://www.obsolyte.com/sunFAQ/faq_hardware/hwref1.html

> Yes and no. The SPARC architecture defines the generic rules
> for designing a SPARCv8 implementation, but does leave much up
> to the designer. For example:
>
>     + MMU implementation can be either the SPARC reference MMU
>       or an implementation of the designer's choice. The capability
>       of the MMU has a huge impact on the design of supervisor code,
>       obviously.
>
>     + Ancillary registers for implementation specific functionality
>       are left up to the designer as to use
>
>     + much Coprocessor/FPU functionality is implementation dependent.
>       The MB86903 has an onboard FPU, but I have no details on its
>       specific capability.
>
etc