Support NT 3.x / 4 PowerPC and MIPS

[donotsdubba]

Hey there, thanks for this awesome work!

From what I understand, some people got your project working on x86 NT 3.x and 4 even, despite this being designed for Win2k.

With this being the case, and with this working also for the exotic DEC Alpha platform, would you consider creating builds for PowerPC and MIPS, as well? They usually require VC++ 4.x on their respective platforms to compile. Both can be run on different VMs, but the PowerPC one is even more accessible now that it runs on Nintendo GameCube / Wii / Wii U and on PowerMacs.

Love the idea of using the SCSI driver for this, brilliant effort. Thank you for this!

[NS-Clone]

and where you get pcie nvme slot on your gamecube?

[donotsdubba]

@NS-Clone The driver would apply to all PowerPC machines.

The GameCube, like the other PowerPC machines I mentioned, is useful for compiling PowerPC NT 3.x and 4.x software, such as the driver, as I conveyed.

(Incidentally, there is an M.2 adapter that attaches to the bottom of the GameCube, which is the form factor of NVMe SSDs as well as some SATA ones, but the current adapter will only accept SATA ones. I won't put it past the realm of possibility of such a converter for NVMe someday popping up, as well, but I also won't hold my breath waiting for it.)

[techomancer]

workcubes dont have pci
the driver now has NT4 support and makefiles. but for now i dont have any machines to run this stuff natively and working on some other projects. i guess there is some support in qemu and mame?
i have no interest in working on pre NT4 stuff, but if someone creates patches for that i will review and merge them.

[donotsdubba]

workcubes dont have pci

Yep, but PowerMacs do.

[sskras]

workcubes dont have pci

Yep, but PowerMacs do.

So are you going to plug the PCIe-to-PCI bridge there?
Or have you possibly seen the NVMe-on-PCI board in the wild, please?

[techomancer]

You need a bridge. Nobody makes PCI-m.2 boards. There are PCI32-PCIe x1 bridge boards available on Amazon and eBay and you can plug in cheap pcie-m.2 adapter board into them. And as long as your firmware and OS knows how to deal with generic PCI bridge it should work.
Also, if you have really old system you may not have 3.3V power on PCI slots like on my SS7 Tekram board. Since both PLX and PERICOM bridge boards I have require 3.3V power I had to add 5V to 3.3V converter board to get it to work.

[red-ray]

I plugged a PLX PEX 8122 into my Motorola PowerStack and it seems to work as the Samsung NVMe SSD showed up on the PCI bus, but not the PEX, very strange.

The PLX PEX 8122 does show up in every x32/x64/Alpha/Itanium system I tested it on.

I have built NVMe2K for PowerPC, but as yet have not tried to run it, I plan to try once I have seen it working on one of my x32 NT4 SP6a systems. Given NT4 SP2 does not have the large disk support that SP6 (SP5?) provides I feel it won't be that useful.

[donotsdubba]

@red-ray Way to go! Looking forward to hearing about your results on both x86 NT4 SP6a as well as PPC NT4 SP2.

Also, any chance of sharing your compiled PPC NVMe2K binaries somewhere?

About SP2 vs. SP5 and later with regards to larger disks, you mean LBA48 support as seen in ATA-6 and later so that disks bigger than 128 GB can be used in their full capacity? Definitely a good point and something worth looking into, to see what we can / cannot do about it.

[red-ray]

@donotsdubba Also, any chance of sharing your compiled PPC NVMe2K binaries somewhere?

Given I have not even tried to install the driver I feel in general not yet. If you run NVMe2K.bat on an NT4 SP2 PPC system with MSVC 4.1 + NT4 DDK installed it should build it. I suspect the NT4 .INF file will need updating to add PPC support.

My PPC system only has 2 x 2GB DEC DSP3210S SCSI drives so I have no real data on what will happen with big disks. One of my x32 NT4 SP6a systems has a 167.68GB SATA SSD and as I recall NT thinks it's only 128GB, the system is multi-boot and the later OSs usually run chkdsk at boot time after I have had NT4 booted even with all the partitions being below 128GB, below is from XP-x32.

[Partitions] 🡐 SIV32X - System Information Viewer V5.85 Beta-05 RXH::ray

Physical Drive (Serial)                 Signature  #  Type             Partition Start     about   Partition Length      about    Hidden  Boot

\0 INTEL SSDSC2BF180A4L (CVDA6080002Q1802GN)DA269839 1 NTFS                     32,256   31.50KB      2,144,346,624     2.00GB   31.50KB  [=]
                                                   2  NTFS               2,144,411,136    2.00GB      2,144,346,624     2.00GB   31.50KB  [_]
                                                   3  NTFS               4,288,790,016    3.99GB      2,144,346,624     2.00GB   31.50KB  [_]
                                                   4  NTFS               6,433,168,896    5.99GB      2,144,346,624     2.00GB   31.50KB  [_]
                                                   5  NTFS               8,577,547,776    7.99GB     17,178,223,104    16.00GB   31.50KB  [_]
                                                   6  NTFS              25,755,803,136   23.99GB     17,178,223,104    16.00GB   31.50KB  [_]
                                                   7  NTFS              42,934,058,496   39.99GB     68,743,089,664    64.02GB   31.50KB  [_]

[  OK ]  [ Copy]   [Windows]  [Machine]  [ DOS ]  [USB Bus]   [Network]  [ SPD ]  [Partitions][Geometry][Volumes]  [Drives]   [ALL Dev]

I have a different 167.68GB SATA SSD for NT 3.51 which reported the size as 7.84GB, I suspect NT4 SP2 will also report this.

Which PPC system do you have? It's only recently I started building the Native PPC SIV32P.exe and would be interested to know how it does on your system, ideally send me the Menu->File->Save Local files. As an incentive if you email them to me (Menu->File->Mail SIV) I will send a reply with the totally untested PPC NVMe2K.sys attached.

See https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=779120#p779120 for notes on running SIV on NT4 and MSVC 4.1 PPC redistributable.