Hi, On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:08 AM Hannes Reinecke <hare@xxxxxxx> wrote: > There are easier ways for this ... I'd start with virtio-ccw and > implement a virtual PUNCHER there ... The larger project scope is making FICON accessories more available for people as crazy as I, that is wanting to run a mainframe as a hobbyist, but maybe not want to buy a metric ton worth of disks or tape robots (a 700 kg mainframe is hard enough by itself to house). I will take a look, but from the name of it it sounds like it will not help me much getting FICON targets supported. Maybe it will help if I ever want FICON initiator. > Still, an uphill struggle; IBM is notorious for not giving out details > about the internals, and simulating a puncher is one of these things. > (And slightly pointless, but who am I to judge ...) It's a low-speed peripheral that has been emulated successfully in Hercules, and there are some petty detailed documents around the CCWs for 3505 around. I figured it would be a good start getting a FICON user-space thing implemented, before I try to tackle e.g. ECKDs or tapes. > However, I do wonder how you came by an FC analyser ... any chance of me > borrowing it occasionally? If you search for Cisco DS-PAA-2 you will find an old accessory used to debug Cisco SAN switches for FC. It only supports 1 and 2 Gigabit, but the nice thing is that it encapsulates the packets as Ethernet frames so you can use e.g. Wireshark to debug what is going on. They cost around $50 on eBay. I have an extra that I probably will not use if you want it. It arrived yesterday so I have not had time to verify the function yet but it should be dead simple that it should work for anything using FC-1 coding I guess. Regards, Chris
