Opinions wanted on Interphase Phoenix SMD Controller

[Craig Leres]

The Interphase 4400 Phoenix is really a 9U board layout of the 4200
Cheetah controller. As far as I know, the only difference between the rom
sets for 4200 and 4400 is a product code that identifies which is which.

We've had 4200's for a few years now and recently bought a 4400. At that
time, I heard rumours that Interphase had Xylogics boot emulation working.
Since my Interphase systems were either loading vmunix off of the net or
some supported disk, I was pretty interested in this. I checked around and
ended up with some new roms for all my 4X00 controllers (I don't think the
new roms were "supported" when I got them). Basically, they emulate enough
of the Xylogics 451 command set to load the various bootstraps and then
vmunix. (In fact, you even "installboot" bootxy onto the Interphase
drive.) I don't think the code is smart enough to do DMA, just programmed
i/o.

Using the new roms, we can hardware booting 3/100, 3/200, and 4/200's.
The sparc is running 4.0 using the Interphase supplied driver. Note that
it's pretty hard (read impossible) to get a machine up that doesn't also
have some supported disk drive. But the controller is much faster than the
wimpy options Sun gives you so we think it's worth the hassle; our Fujitsu
2344's run within 10% of their rated 2 Mbyte/sec transfer rate. That's on
a 3/100; a colleague running Hitchi gigabyte drives through a Xylogics
7053 on a 4/200 only gets 1.2 Mbytes/sec...

The roms I'm using are revision 040, 9/19/1980, product variation 36
(which indicates Xylogics boot emulation).

	Craig

P.S. If anyone has experience with running Fujitsu Eagles on a 4200,
please get in touch with me.