Author Topic: Is there any SCSI PCI Express card supported by OS/2 ?  (Read 12195 times)

madbrain

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Re: Is there any SCSI PCI Express card supported by OS/2 ?
« Reply #15 on: January 10, 2019, 10:06:06 pm »
I have only experience with VirtualBox and the outdated VirtualPC. What I remember from VMWare (ESXi) is that there doesn't exist OS/2 guest additions. That usually means that mouse and keyboard don't support seamless switching. I don't remember how the video driver behaves. There might be huge differences regarding the availability of features between VirtualBox and VMWare. Jan van Wijk was the first who wrote about a successful installation under VMWare ESXi.

Yes, I know VMWare doesn't have any OS/2 additions, sadly. I wouldn't be using ESXi. Probably the free VMWare player .

Sean Casey

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Re: Is there any SCSI PCI Express card supported by OS/2 ?
« Reply #16 on: December 04, 2019, 07:59:24 am »
Checkign arround, there is this Ultra 320 that has some OS/2 drivers (AICU320.ADD). According to some sites (like Amazon) there are some PCIe Ultra 320 cards, but I have no idea if those models will be working with OS/2.

To close the loop  on this thread....

I have been testing OS/2 SCSI with VirtualBox, and VMware's ESXi (Type-1) and Workstation Pro (Type-2) hypervisors.  I have settled on using ArcaOS (my desktop) hosted on VirtualBox and Warp Server hosted on ESXi (6.7 U3).  Although I don't have a need for SCSI on VirtualBox, I was interested to see if I could get PCI passthrough working and was unsuccessful.   Setting up SCSI PCI passthrough on ESXi was uneventful and works fine; however, I had mixed results with OS/2 (ArcaOS and eBS 4.52).   

The Good:  The older Adaptec PCI-x SCSI cards (e.g., 39160/29320) with the StarTech PCI to PCIe Adapter using the AICU320.ADD driver works fine with OS/2 and the software I used for testing.  It also works fine with PCI passthrough on ESXi.  The down side is that the StarTech adapter only utilizes the card's 32-bit bus connector, leaving the 64-bit pins unused which extend beyond the adapter card.  This will impair the performance of the faster tape drives (e.g., LTO), but not be a problem for slower drives (e.g., DDS).   I will be using this setup with Warp Server on a 24/7 ESXi host.

The Bad:  The LSI20320 PCIe SCSI card and attached SCSI tape drives were recognized by OS/2 with the LSIMPT.ADD Fusion-MPT (U320) driver.  Unfortunately, the proprietary SCSI drivers for two OS/2 backup programs I tried did not recognize the attached drives.  Oddly, the backup software PC-BAX also provides a MicroChannel SCSI driver that allowed it to recognize the tape drives, but produced API errors when attempting tape operations.  The LSI20320 using VMware Workstation Pro and SCSI card emulation works fine with OS/2 and all tape backup applications I tested.  The LSI20320 with ESXi, Windows 2003 Server and ARCserve didn't work.

The Ugly: I could not get the Adaptec 29320LP PCIe card recognized by OS/2, although this card works fine with ESXi PCI passthrough, Windows 2003 Server and ARCserve.   The 29320LP also works fine with VMware Workstation Pro and SCSI card emulation with OS/2.

On a side note, PCI SCSI passthrough requires a PCI card to be dedicated to a single VM guest, while PCI emulation allowed me to allocate specific SCSI devices on a single PCI card to my Linux host, and OS/2 and Windows guests, which would operate the devices concurrently.  Two of my ESXi guests will be using SCSI, requiring the use of two SCSI cards.
« Last Edit: December 04, 2019, 08:07:10 am by Sean Casey »