August 6, 2025

Sun 3 bootrom souce - drivers

Here is a list of drivers that are included in the bootrom source: 
if_ie.c -- Intel ethernet 82586 (onboard in 3/160 and 3/280)
if_le.c -- AMD "lance" AM7990 ethernet (onboard in 3/60 and 3/80)
sc.c -- common scsi
sd.c -- scsi disk
st.c -- scsi tape
si.c -- scsi interface (NCR 5380)
xy.c -- Xylogics 440/450 SMD disk controller - multibus on VME adapter
xd.c -- Xylogics 751 SMD disk controller - 6U VME card in adapter
xt.c -- Xylogics 472 tape controller - multibus on VME adapter
tm.c -- Ciprico TapeMaster 9 track tape - multibus on VME
It would be worth making some notes about what hardware various sun3 machines had. For example a 3/160 used the intel ethernet and had no onboard scsi. The 3/60 had the AMD ethernet along with onboard scsi.

In this day and age I am tempted to omit many of the old drivers. I don't think anyone is still trying to use SMD disks or nine track tape. We can omit the Xylogics drivers from our build. If anyone wants to work with this old gear, they will need to use to original Sun roms.

Drivers are added in sys/boot.c by adding the boottab structure for the driver to the boottab table.

My boards

I used to have quite a pile of Sun 9U VME boards. I gave almost all of my old Sun gear away.

I kept several boards what were adapters from the big 9U VME that Sun used to multibus or 6U VME. I have: 

Two 6U VME boards with 5380 scsi chips.
One multibus board with an Intel ethernet chip.
One multibus board with ADC hardware.
The ADC board was never supported by Sun. The other scsi and ethernet were never supported by the bootrom. The intel ethernet would have been a second network for a machine that might have been used as a gateway or such. I once had a bunch of Xylogics boards, but they are long gone.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org