Sonnet PPC PCI Card

[Piru]

@Argus

or choosing to boot from the Sonnet and into OS4.0+ (assuming some form of special UBoot was made for it).

Since there is no way to access the amiga HW from the Sonnet and OS4 shuts down the 680x0 CPU, there is no way it could work. No UBoot can fix this.

The only option would be to have special build of OS4 that would not access amiga HW at all (no one really wants to use this 680x0 bridging stuff, it would be too painful).

Regardless, the Elbox claim that "SharkPPC" (read: sonnet crescendo 7200) would have worked out of the box with the Classic OS4 is clearly a lie. Basically it was used as a marketing ploy: Sell new "SharkPPC" compatible Mediator boards, with "SharkPPC" becoming available "as soon as OS4 is ready".

[Piru]

@arnljot

Imagine if UAE could wrap this card and present it to the emulated amiga as a Blizzard or Cyberstorm.

It would be a total nightmare to interface some totally independently running HW to some software emulation. PPC with software emulation is actually easier and more likely to happen.

It could perhaps even accellerate a SAM440 or Efika?

No it couldn't. Not in any way that would make any sense (not to mention the limitation of single PCI slot in Efika... well ok you can run Efika headless using Linux, but frankly, if you use linux and need speed, use something else than Efika).

[Piru]

@Aminik

It is 100% pointless to even try. There is no way it could work.

[Piru]

@mike-

Oh come on. OS4 never even finds the Sonnet card, regardless of what you attempt to do with the kicklayout file.

[Piru]

Heck its worth a look isnt it?

No, in this case it really isn't. There is absolutely no way it could work.

[Piru]

but it looks like it loaded some ppc native modules

Even if it did (it reported error after all), there would be no way to execute them, so it did not run any PPC code.

With PUP OSes the bootstrap is m68k, so obviously it runs somewhat.

[Piru]

@Aminik

It has nothing to do with being taboo. It's just that it's not technically feasible.

Anyway i believe that, after seeing the Natami specifications, which includes 2 pci slots and a cpu expansion probably for ppc, then maybe the Natami team would implement the idea of the Sonnet card because i think they are also enhancing the kickstart.

I've yet to see any of their grand plans actually work. Most of the enchancement talk seems to come people who have little understanding on how it would be done, or how hard it would be. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Or another idea, what if we start a machine with a 040 accelerator for example and amigaos 3.9 installed and see how the os3.9 will react to this card....

No need to. It completely ignores the card.

[Piru]

@Hans_

That's not entirely true is it? Amiga OS 3.9 will recognize that there is a PCI card with vendor and device IDs matching the Sonnet card, then, and only then, will it ignore the card.

Sure, but since we're splitting hair, strictly speaking the pci subsystem is not part of the AmigaOS 3.9, it's always a third party thing. :-)
That is, if you boot a vanilla 3.9 installation it will 100% ignore the PCI subsystem and the card.

Anyway, the vendor PCI ID would be 0x16b8, at least for the sonnet card. However, elbox would have probably "done the Spider" and changed the PCI ID number to prevent people from using the cheap original cards. See elboxdecrypt.