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Good day all. Anyone know where I can find development specs for the
Sparc Station 20? I would like information on the

internal architecture of the system
system bus
SBUS
MBUS
memory map (very important)
development manuals for the various peripheral devices (audio,scsi,etc)
list of Open Boot Rom routines and method to access them

Any and all information will be appreciated. Most of what I have gathered
from Sun's website and the net are rather limited. I have the sparc
architecture manual, but, I am considering writing Sun to request access
to the information that I am not able to find, if thats possible.

Information for the Ultra 5/10 series (for example) is readily available on
on their site, but nothing for the earlier systems

"guest" <guest@AmonRa.here> wrote in message
news:slrnbm1q90.i6e.guest@AmonRa.here...
> Good day all. Anyone know where I can find development specs for the
> Sparc Station 20? I would like information on the
>
> internal architecture of the system
> system bus
> SBUS
> MBUS
> memory map (very important)
> development manuals for the various peripheral devices (audio,scsi,etc)
> list of Open Boot Rom routines and method to access them
>
> Any and all information will be appreciated. Most of what I have gathered
> from Sun's website and the net are rather limited. I have the sparc
> architecture manual, but, I am considering writing Sun to request access
> to the information that I am not able to find, if thats possible.
>
> Information for the Ultra 5/10 series (for example) is readily available
on
> on their site, but nothing for the earlier systems
>

I remember when I had one of these, I thought wow, so much better that the
SparcStation 10 and the 2 before that. I suspect you do not care about any
of the newer Solaris distributions. If you did, you would forget about the
20. However, if you do searchs on google, you might find most of what you
want. For instance, a google search on "MBUS development guide" leads to
http://sunsite.ee/books/books/Catanzaro/Catanzaro.html. I doubt sun has the
book mentioned any longer but digging a little futher you might find
something.

Brad

Brad wrote:
> "guest" <guest@AmonRa.here> wrote in message
> news:slrnbm1q90.i6e.guest@AmonRa.here...
>
>>Good day all. Anyone know where I can find development specs for the
>>Sparc Station 20? I would like information on the
>>
>>internal architecture of the system
>>system bus
>>SBUS
>>MBUS
>>memory map (very important)
>>development manuals for the various peripheral devices (audio,scsi,etc)
>>list of Open Boot Rom routines and method to access them
>>
>>Any and all information will be appreciated. Most of what I have gathered
>>from Sun's website and the net are rather limited. I have the sparc
>>architecture manual, but, I am considering writing Sun to request access
>>to the information that I am not able to find, if thats possible.
>>
>>Information for the Ultra 5/10 series (for example) is readily available
>
> on
>
>>on their site, but nothing for the earlier systems
>>
>
>
> I remember when I had one of these, I thought wow, so much better that the
> SparcStation 10 and the 2 before that. I suspect you do not care about any
> of the newer Solaris distributions. If you did, you would forget about the
> 20. However, if you do searchs on google, you might find most of what you
> want. For instance, a google search on "MBUS development guide" leads to
> http://sunsite.ee/books/books/Catanzaro/Catanzaro.html. I doubt sun has the
> book mentioned any longer but digging a little futher you might find
> something.
>
> Brad
>
>
>
Nothing wrong with a SS20 especially if you can get a couple of the
125MHz processors or Hypersparcs. However found the following link to
Prentice Hall from Sunsite

http://sunsite.ee/books/catalog/pren...all-order.html

Keith

guest wrote:
>
> Good day all. Anyone know where I can find development specs for the
> Sparc Station 20?

As a matter of interest, why do you want the information ? Fancy writing
a Ph.D. thesis on the development of early SMP systems ??

If you intend writing something about it, perhaps sticking the drafts on
a web site and letting others send you any extra they know might be
useful.

I assume you have looked at
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub...SS20/SS20.html

A page of mine has some links that might be relevant, although most of
the links are broken now. Anyway, you can take a look for yourself

http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek/...ful-sparc.html

Magicomp's sysinfo()
http://www.MagniComp.com/sysinfo/#getlicense
digs around and finds quite a bit of information. Run that if you have
not already done so.

Did you know there were some different air vents, that allowed more air
to flow if you had more CPUs ?? I heard about this and looking at the 5
I have, I note one does have vents that offer considerably less
restriction to air than the others.

Here's a few hacks I made to an SS20

http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek/sun/cool.html

- note there's a link about mbus modules in that, although you probably
have that information if you have done your homework.

> I would like information on the
> internal architecture of the system

There's a bit about the SS20's internal architecture in the book 'Sun
performance and tuning' by Adrian Cockroft and Richard Pettit. But not a
huge amount. Probably no more than you can get from the service manual.

> system bus
> SBUS
> MBUS

I'm surprised you can't find information on the sbus. After all, Sun
released that information to 3rd parties such as Magma
http://www.magma.com/
to make add-on cards. Hypersparc CPUs could be bought from Bridgeport.
Whether or not the latter was with Sun's approval I don't know, but if
it was, they made that info available. Perhaps under NDA's though.

> memory map (very important)

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub.../MEM_SS20.html

has the memory map.

> development manuals for the various peripheral devices (audio,scsi,etc)
> list of Open Boot Rom routines and method to access them

Sun are very good at providing documentation. Over the last couple of
years I've visited several sites (HP, IBM, Cray, SGI .. ) for
information on older machines and there is no doubt in my mind Sun are
the best at providing information.

To access the manual for a debugger on a Cray you need a password!!! Why
the hell they don't make the information public I really don't know.
Perhaps they are frightened the occasional Cray that comes up on eBay is
taking their trade away. I don't think so some how.

You can run help at the OBP and see what routines are available. There
are EPROM images on the web.

> Any and all information will be appreciated. Most of what I have gathered
> from Sun's website and the net are rather limited. I have the sparc
> architecture manual, but, I am considering writing Sun to request access
> to the information that I am not able to find, if thats possible.

I'm sure the information is of no commercial value to Sun now, so you
might find someone willing to dig it out. The problem would I suspect be
the time (i.e. money) it would take someone to find it and the time/cost
it would take to get approval for its release.

> Information for the Ultra 5/10 series (for example) is readily available on
> on their site, but nothing for the earlier systems

I assume you have the service manual 801-6189-12.pdf ??

Good luck, but please let us know why you want such details stuff on the
machine.

--
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day
they start making vacuum cleaners." -Ernst Jan Plugge.

Dr. David Kirkby,
Senior Research Fellow,
Department of Medical Physics,
University College London,
11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
Website: http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek
Author of 'atlc' http://atlc.sourceforge.net/

On 2003-09-12, Brad <xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx> wrote:
> I remember when I had one of these, I thought wow, so much better that the
> SparcStation 10 and the 2 before that. I suspect you do not care about any
> of the newer Solaris distributions. If you did, you would forget about the
> 20. However, if you do searchs on google, you might find most of what you
> want. For instance, a google search on "MBUS development guide" leads to
> http://sunsite.ee/books/books/Catanzaro/Catanzaro.html. I doubt sun has the
> book mentioned any longer but digging a little futher you might find
> something.

Thanks, I found the book on amazon.com (no new copies just two used ones) and
ordered RIGHT AWAY!

Thanks again.
1 down 5 to go ?

On 2003-09-12, Keith R Kilby <krkilby@qinetiq.com> wrote:
>
I picked up an SS20 with dual 75mhz processors. I am not too concerned with
the performance as I am with understanding SMP related issues.

On 2003-09-12, Dr. David Kirkby <drkirkby@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> As a matter of interest, why do you want the information ? Fancy writing
> a Ph.D. thesis on the development of early SMP systems ??

No not really. I want to port over an OS development project I worked on in
the past (under the i386).

The beauty of the i386 - IBM pc is that a plethora of books exists documenting
every detail of the processor and support peripherals. Theres info on the
net governing

the boot process,
bios, routines
programmable interrupt controller
programmable interval timer
dma chip
vga display
etc

x86 differences and opcodes
x86 operating modes (real and protected)
x86 ring levels
x86 memory map(segmentation, paging,etc)
etc etc

Thats basically the sort of information I would like to get for the Sun IPC
and SS20.

I could spend hours digging through the linux and bsd sources but I wont
learn anything and I will be LIMITED to the decisions they made to deal with
certain issues/problems, whereas with the information they have ...

> I assume you have looked at
> http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub...SS20/SS20.html

yes

> I'm surprised you can't find information on the sbus. After all, Sun
> released that information to 3rd parties such as Magma
> http://www.magma.com/
> to make add-on cards. Hypersparc CPUs could be bought from Bridgeport.
> Whether or not the latter was with Sun's approval I don't know, but if
> it was, they made that info available. Perhaps under NDA's though.

NDA seems likely.

>> memory map (very important)
>
> http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub.../MEM_SS20.html
> has the memory map.

Now, if only I had documentation on where the OBP resides and the process
involved when I run the command "boot disk" - where on the disk it expects
to find the boot loader and what sort of format (if any) it expects.

>> development manuals for the various peripheral devices (audio,scsi,etc)
>> list of Open Boot Rom routines and method to access them
>
> Sun are very good at providing documentation. Over the last couple of
> years I've visited several sites (HP, IBM, Cray, SGI .. ) for
> information on older machines and there is no doubt in my mind Sun are
> the best at providing information.

I plan on writing them to request such information .. I hope they are open
to the idea ...

> You can run help at the OBP and see what routines are available. There
> are EPROM images on the web.

hrmm, then ill need a disassembler to figure out whats available, method of
passing parameters, return values,etc - surely this is documented somewhere
on earth

>> Any and all information will be appreciated. Most of what I have gathered
>> from Sun's website and the net are rather limited. I have the sparc
>> architecture manual, but, I am considering writing Sun to request access
>> to the information that I am not able to find, if thats possible.
>
> I'm sure the information is of no commercial value to Sun now, so you
> might find someone willing to dig it out. The problem would I suspect be
> the time (i.e. money) it would take someone to find it and the time/cost
> it would take to get approval for its release.

Thanks for the suggestions ...

> + On 12-Sep-03 02:02:14
+Brad <xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx> wrote

>I remember when I had one of these, I thought wow, so much better that the
>SparcStation 10 and the 2 before that. I suspect you do not care about any
>of the newer Solaris distributions. If you did, you would forget about the
>20. However, if you do searchs on google, you might find most of what you

Solaris8, and probably Sol9 too, works very fine on SS10 and SS20 hardware
if you have enough RAM, I run Sol8 on my SS5 and both SS10's.

For a workstation it might be a bit slow however.. depending on what you
want to do.

guest wrote:
>
> On 2003-09-12, Dr. David Kirkby <drkirkby@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > As a matter of interest, why do you want the information ? Fancy writing
> > a Ph.D. thesis on the development of early SMP systems ??
>
> No not really. I want to port over an OS development project I worked on in
> the past (under the i386).
>
> The beauty of the i386 - IBM pc is that a plethora of books exists documenting
> every detail of the processor and support peripherals. Theres info on the
> net governing

I hate to say it, but why bother porting the OS to a machine that is
well passed its sell-by-date?

Why not port it to an UltraSPARC based machine, where at least someone
might be inclined to use it - assuming you don't intend keeping this
just for yourself. I don't think OpenBSD bothers supporting Sun 4m,
probably realising it is wasted effort.

I really like the SS20. In my humble opinion it was Sun's best
workstation, taken in context of when it was produced. Sun don't have
any quad processor workstations today. The Ultra 80 (discontinued) which
I had is quad processor, but while I like it, I think one would have to
admit the SS20 was more revolutionary than the U80. But I still think
it's a bit of a waste of time porting a new OS to sun4m.

I don't know if it is still available, but the Solaris sources were at
one time available, although under very restricted licensing. I don't
however think it is still possible to get them.

--
"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably
the day they start making vacuum cleaners." -Ernst Jan Plugge.

Dr. David Kirkby,
Senior Research Fellow,
Department of Medical Physics,
University College London,
11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
Website: http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek
Author of 'atlc' http://atlc.sourceforge.net/

On 2003-09-13, Dr. David Kirkby <drkirkby@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> guest wrote:
>>
> I hate to say it, but why bother porting the OS to a machine that is
> well passed its sell-by-date?
>
> Why not port it to an UltraSPARC based machine, where at least someone
> might be inclined to use it - assuming you don't intend keeping this
> just for yourself. I don't think OpenBSD bothers supporting Sun 4m,
> probably realising it is wasted effort.

Some of the older machines were the best designed ones. It reminds me of the
crop of video games we have now and those written in the past. The emergence
of emulator software allowing gamers to play genesis,super nintendo,neogeo
etc classics with ROMS is a similar idea.

Basically I like the design of the SS20, I get my thrill from interacting
with the hardware at the low-level that kernel code runs on. Its a passion
and a hobby.

> admit the SS20 was more revolutionary than the U80. But I still think
> it's a bit of a waste of time porting a new OS to sun4m.

But what I will gain (in knowlegde and experience) is immeasurable and worth
any time I devote to that endeavor.

If only I could get the specs manuals I need.

> I don't know if it is still available, but the Solaris sources were at
> one time available, although under very restricted licensing. I don't
> however think it is still possible to get them.

I spoke to someone on IRC about this. This individual told me that although
the Solaris Source was available at one time, the portion implementing the
routines for communicating with the hardware were delivered as object files.

So the WHOLE source was not available - probably just the algorithms and
data structures the kernel employed in its every day task.

Very limited if you ask me.