Hello.

THE ADAPTEC 2940UW CARD BOOTS UNDER OPEN FIRMWARE!

I have recently successfully conquered OpenFirmware 1.0.5 on my 
PowerCenter Pro 210 and gotten NetBSD to boot for me. :) I was dismayed 
when I learned that the 2940 cards were very obviously unsupported, 
though slightly relieved that the 2930 cards were supported (and even 
used as an example in the install notes). Upon inserting the 2930 into 
my system and connecting my devices, however, I was surprised that they 
seemed inaccessible at the OF prompt - there were no "words" for that 
device, and no "sd@0" or "disk@0" type things showed up underneath it. 
So I swapped my 2940UW card back in, and just for fun connected it to 
see how it would behave in OF. Amazingly, it was fine. I could access 
both my hard disk and CD-ROM... I can easily boot NetBSD off the hard 
disk connected to the SCSI card using the following command:

boot /bandit/ADPT,2940UW/disk@0:0

it hooks right into the "partition zero" bootloader which is apparently 
installed with NetBSD and boots right up.

So I suppose my question is - what's the story with documentation about 
Adaptec card support on NetBSD/macppc? The 2930B card didn't work for 
me under OF 1.0.5 - it's an old firmware revision, and it could 
possibly be the PC version (it was an OEM card, and the Adaptec 
PowerDomain control program for Mac OS says it's too old to control). 
The 2940UW card (which may also have been OEM), with the firmware 
flashed to version 4.1, worked fine. Please at least solicit further 
testing for this - I would hate for other users to go through all the 
card-swapping, NVRAM-losing trouble.


Shorah,

Henry