>From what I saw in the A-class grouper, the PCI cards are indeed off the
shelf.  For example, he SCSI controllers are from Symbios.  I guess one
could say that PCI is PCI, until PCI-X arrives.  :)  The only issue would
arise if there were a driver missing for a specific PCI card, but since MPE
doesn't support much hardware to begin with, I don't this is would be a
problem.


Denys...

-----Original Message-----
From: OpenMPE Support Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Gavin
Scott
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 3:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Which MPE on the Emulator

Yosef writes:
> I would think that it is worthwhile taking advantage of the fibre channel
> connectivity only available in MPE/iX 7.5.

Since the "fibre channel connectivity" consists primarily of drivers for the
HP fibre channel adapters for their PA-RISC servers, and we aren't going to
have those cards in a box emulating a PC, it's unlikely that your ability to
talk to fibre channel devices from an emulated MPE environment will be
affected by whether or not MPE thinks it supports native fibre channel.

Once again, we can hook up disks up to an emulation platform any way we
like, as long as we make MPE *think* that they are connected via plain old
SCSI or whatever it supports.  Chances are we would find out which interface
that MPE supports is the most efficient from an MPE CPU point of view, and
then make all physical interfaces look to MPE as that kind of interface.
MPE won't know what's going on, so it will have no opportunity to *not*
support super-ultra-quantum-fibre-channel-eight-from-the-year-2025, or
whatever people want to hook up to it in the future.

Of course it would be interesting to know if you could use HP's PCI
interface cards in a PC, and if so how hard it would be to make the emulator
"pass through" to the actual card that the MPE driver thinks it's talking
to.

Chances are that the HP PCI cards are very-nearly some off-the-shelf cards
that we *could* get for a PC server.

G.