Internships/ProjectIdeas/HppaDevices
Implement LASI network card and/or NCR 710 SCSI controller device models
Expected outcome: Develop device emulations of the HP PA-RISC LASI network card and/or NCR 710 SCSI controller
QEMU can emulate a lot of physical machines. Beside widely used x86 machines as used with KVM, this includes historic machines based on PowerPC, Alpha or HP PA-RISC CPUs too. To emulate additional historic machine models, device models that emulate specific hardware like network or SCSI cards need to be developed.
This project is about developing such a device model for the historic HP PA-RISC architecture. Based on the knowledge and interest of the applicant, here are two non-exclusive options:
1. LASI network card. This is basically an Intel 82596 network chip, which was integrated into another ASIC in the HP 700 series. That chip was used in SUN machines as well, and the full Linux driver source code for the various machines is available. A QEMU device model exists (see here and here), but it's not fully functional yet. Datasheets for this chip exists too. This project is about debugging and analyzing existing code, including development of missing code.
2. First-generation NCR 710 SCSI controller. Really old machines used a NCR 710 SCSI controller, for which currently no QEMU device model exists. QEMU has a LSI53C895A device model, which partly even allows emulating a LSI53C810, but those chips are "too new" and as such are not accepted and supported on old operating systems (e.g. HP-UX9). The WinUAE project seem to have modified the existing QEMU device model to emulate a NCR 710 to support the Amiga. The goal of this project is to develop a nice & clean NCR 710 device model that can be merged into QEMU.
Links:
Details:
- Project size: 350 hours
- Skill level: advanced
- Language: C
- Mentor: Helge Deller (deller@gmx.de)