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".

[arnljot]

I know Tony (of WinUAE) doesn't like PPC amigas... but Imagine if UAE could wrap this card and present it to the emulated amiga as a Blizzard or Cyberstorm. That would be a little fun...

But the most use we could have for it seems to be as a "extra CPU" for a x86 AROS or Morphos machine.

It could perhaps even accellerate a SAM440 or Efika?

[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).

[Aminik]

tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.

I was watching this conversation and i know there is a guy from Amigahellas.gr who ordered a Sonnet G3 card and tried it on the mediator of his 1200. As far as i can remember, it was tested firstly without an accelerator and provided the message "not enough memory"  and then a "return code 20" , later it was attempted with acceleration 68040 and he got the message that  Kickstart/intuition.library.kmod cannot be opened or something like that. And the stopped the attempts as far as i can tell.

(attempted only with Amigaos 4)

I am no expert on such things, a programmer might understand better what those things mean. I can point to this user this thread as he might give you more info on the errors he received which errors may help understand more on this issue.

[Piru]

@Aminik

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

[Hans_]

Aminik wrote:

tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.

I was watching this conversation and i know there is a guy from Amigahellas.gr who ordered a Sonnet G3 card and tried it on the mediator of his 1200. As far as i can remember, it was tested firstly without an accelerator and provided the message "not enough memory"  and then a "return code 20" , later it was attempted with acceleration 68040 and he got the message that  Kickstart/intuition.library.kmod cannot be opened or something like that. And the stopped the attempts as far as i can tell.

Given that Amiga OS 4 for classic Amiga hardware was written for the Phase 5 accelerators, and not a Sonnet card, it's not going to work. The boot code won't even be looking for a PowerPC card. A special version would have to be written. From what others have said, it sounds like it would be a nightmare to do.

Hans

[Aminik]

@Piru

Probably it is pointless, but i understand him, he just have to try it to see it for himself, to see the errors feedback, it is useful to know. I would have done the same thing if i owned a mediator.

@Hans. I do not know if it is a nightmare or not, but if Elbox had abandoned this project surely something serious had happened.

Only consider that if it was successful , IF, it would have been the cheapest way ever to equip an A1200 or A4000 with a PPC card! AmigaOs 4 would have rocketed in terms of sales!! Thats a big IF...

[mike-]

@Aminik

tell him to comment out the kernel module in the kicklayout file and try again, its already loaded some modules, guess they might be 68k tho, but then he "only" has to write a new kernel module for the sonnet card and pray os4 is "naive" enough to boot.

EDIT: actually it looks like it might have loaded a few ppc modules MODULE Kickstart/intuition.library.kmod is way down on the list, im only guessing tho.

[Piru]

@mike-

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

[Sir_Lucas]

@Piru

It's worth doing, though. Even if it does not work If it doesn't, then it might be said that the attempts had been made

[jimmyboy]

Wouldnt it be easier to put one in a X86 mobo. Program the first part of the boot to disable the X86 cpu and use just the sonnet card. Maybe have the X86 run a basic prog to run the sonnet card in the background of the OS. Just like the 680*0 cpu gets disabled on boot or something simalar. Then you would have 3.3v and use of more common hardware.

Ok grill me Piru.....im off to hide....

[persia]

In the end you can buy an old G4 power Mac for less and have a complete system.  This would only make sense if you could run OS4 on it.  But in the end it would be better to get OS4 on PPC Macs which have an almost unlimited supply...

[mike-]

Heck its worth a look isnt it?
My best suggestion would be messing with both the a1 version and the classic

Im quite sure i've seen a driver for the shark in the mediator drivers, if its there it might reveal some clues

[Piru]

Heck its worth a look isnt it?

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

[mike-]

I totally get your point, the kernel itself untouched would have no clue where to go, and the mentioned incompatibilities, but it looks like it loaded some ppc native modules to me and that's got me a bit puzzled and i would look into that.

[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.