20 Apr
2006
20 Apr
'06
2:57 p.m.
jim stephens wrote:
The way the ARTIC960 cards and the P/390 LIC code work are very
different. ARTIC960 isn't simply a library. It's a card with an i960
running custom firmware to emulate a complete channel processor.
You put a
P/390 on the same bus (PCI or MCA) as an ARTIC960 card and
the P/390 can busmaster and take over the ARTIC960 card. The ARTIC960
then appears as a channel in the mainframe.
I am not at all familiar with the RTIC libraries, but what I have, I
would not
infer that the libraries can do what the P/390's LIC can do. I remember
discussions with Marty Ziskind at the first show that they came to and they
not only cooked the code for what they did with the I/O for channels,
etc, but also ran their own specialized Token ring code libraries, to allow
them to use unused token ring features for their CTCA emulated between
P/370's ( later P/390 ) (no I'm not talking about the AT/370, but the
first
cards were not 390). Again, this assumes that you want to write your own
code and use the
hardware like this. That turns out to be very different than what IBM
can do with the same hardware and their software on the same pile a
lot of times.
I know for a fact that IBM's off-the-shelf code can use an ARTIC960
Parallel Channel to talk to a channel-attached peripheral, because I've
used it for that purpose. Both at home and at work.
The ARTIC960 Parallel Channel Adapter was even sold specifically for
that purpose in a combination package with the P/390 PCI.
Peace... Sridhar