SunPCi / Intel 21555 drivers

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Date:	Mon, 1 Mar 2004 18:49:29 -0500 (EST)
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org

Hi,

We are trying to develop a linux driver (and related software) to use a
SunPCi 3 (or SunPCi 2 or even 1, for that matter) card inside a Linux x86
box rather than a Solaris/Sparc box.

SunPCi cards are PCI cards developed by Sun (duh) that contain an almost
fully functional x86 pc. The PCI card has a cpu, ram, northbridge,
southbridge, serial, parallel, external video, usb, firewire, etc. It
connects to the PCI bus of the host computer through an Intel 21555
non-transparent PCI bridge.

On the Solaris side, Sun keeps diskimage files which act as the hard
drives for the guest OS. There is an additional 1024 bytes at the front of
the file that contains the CMOS required to boot the system and some other
(unknown) stuff.

#losetup -o 1024 foo.diskimage /dev/loop0
will give you a loopback mounted drive from one of their files.

The OS running on the guest has Sun provided block device drivers that
interact with the 21555 to present the files on the host side of the
bridge as disks. These specialized guest OS drivers allow the guest system
to run Linux (redhat 9 based installer), DOS, and a number of flavors of
Windows. Mouse and keyboard also come up through the 21555.

All of this is tied together to act like a hardware virtual machine.
It feels a lot like VMware in some ways. By running the "sunpci"
application on Solaris, a window pops up with a different OS running
inside it. When you click on the window, the keyboard device goes through
the bridge as the guest OS's keyboard. Video comes back down through the
bridge to an X application running on solaris (unless you use the -v flag
which tells video to go out the external video on the back of the card
instead).

We have a PCI bus analyzer from Silicon Control to help figure out what is
going on on the Solaris side of things. We can also use the "debug"
program on DOS and "lspci" (and other tools) on Linux on the guest side to
more easily see what is going on from a hardware standpoint there. We are
in the beginning stages of developing a Linux driver for the host side.

Has anyone attempted a driver for these cards?
Is there any existing code out there for these cards or for the Intel
21555 chip? Code for the Intel 21554 (previously DEC) chip would also be
useful as it was used in SunPCi generations 1 and 2 cards. Any additional
tools, resources, or suggestions on how to proceed are most welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Dan Sturtevant and Chris Lalancette

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