Slaving An Old Pc

[n25an]

OK... I know that in the old days of computers you could get expansion systems which was a box as big as your PC that contained additional expansion slots...
today that has largely been superseded driver boards and by expansion cards with multiple ports...
there are still expansion systems out there... like back-planes by one stop systems and back-plane boards like what you see in arcade games and slot machines and "ATM"s... and in industrial applications back-planes are everywhere...

what I am asking is if there is a way to turn an old PC into a quote unquote back-plane via LINUX or any other software... this way the PC slots can be used by the main computer as if they were its own... not concerned about speed... just curious if it can be done... and if anyone knows of any solutions...

[n25an]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

did a bit of checking and still found nothing...
but I did find that you can use the pci-e slot to add multiple expansion slots through via pci extender riser cards and pci-e riser cards... still not what I am looking for but a step in the right direction... let me know if you guys have any ideas...

[rthonpm]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

What exactly are you trying to do?

Sent from my BlackBerry using Tapatalk

[n25an]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

just trying to turn an old pc into an active backplane for another pc... in essence... I want all its expansion slots to be accessible as if they are part of the master pc...
I understand... I can turn the old pc in to a server...
I understand... I can share out its hard drives... or make a file server...
I understand... I can share out the resources of the old pc of all except ram
I also understand... that with the way computers are going today... you can create ad adhoc backplane in a box via expansion boards and pcie extender cards and a secondary desktop case...
I also understand... you can get a backplane expansion system... which is basically a board in a desktop case with as much as 20 expansion slots... that you can connect to your pc...
I am just curious if anyone has ever slaved a pc... memory and all to another pc as if it were part of the master pc... as if it were a backplane expansion system...
I figured with the way linux distros were going someone would have done it already... or there was some windows solution that I was missing or there was some onboard dip switch setting I was missing....
if you still don't get what I am saying... think of it like this... you have two routers... but you can turn one into a switch to expand the ports on the other...
so you have two computers... you can turn one into a basic backplane to expand the expansion ports on the other...

so now you ask what is a backplane... in the old days of computers z80 and the like... basically the idea was to have a single board computer that fits into another board that is the backplane which basically means bus for all the other peripherals... these could be other peripherals or even single board computers... one single board computer or sbc for short would be the master and the other sbc and/or peripheral would be slaved to it... eventually this morphed into the motherboard... which is an active back plane which is an intelligent backplane with memory... and processing attached... but for certain applications backplane setup is much more reliable over mother board... and far more easier to service... you just pop out a board and pop another in... because the intelligence and processing is in the card... not the backplane... so card a goes bad... pop out card a and pop in another card a... etc... where as with a motherboard... if the motherboard goes bad... it could take you a while to get it out and replace or repair and replace... backplane systems eventually evolved sbc into embedded computers with a dedicated program running on an embedded os of windows or linux... the idea is why reinvent the wheel... a good example of where you might find something like this is a slot machine in a casino... or an arcade machine that runs something like tekken 7... where there are peripherals that run the signals that go to the monitors... an sbc that process the payment... in some cases an sbc or peripheral that processes the joystick and or gaming pad , another for the sound... another for possible motion control on the chair the player sits in and a sbc that runs the game that ties it all together... all connected via a backplane that could be passive or active or somewhere in between... and instead of a pci ports... you can have all manner of ports on the backplane from usb to dvi to serial to parallel... you name it... it can be there...

now as it relates to copiers and printers... the mainboard/motherboard with the ram and intelligence and processing... functions as an active back-plane for the copier or printer and depending on the price of the system and the design philosophy of the engineering team that designed it... can be very easy or hard to pull out...

basically a backplane is the expansion slots and ports in a package that excludes the motherboard...
atleast thats my understanding...

[rthonpm]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

That's a little clearer. Unless you're dealing with custom built equipment down to the BIOS you're not going to really find a way to do this natively.

The closest you can get is going to be setting up a cluster, which doesn't allow for a physical connection but essentially allows one computer to allocate and manage the processing and resources of the others to work together. Doing it with PC's can get expensive since you need very fast connections between the nodes and similar resources in all of them to properly balance the workloads. In the time and energy it takes to build one out you'd be better off just either building a giant single machine that lets you use all of your hardware or just clustering together a bunch of Raspberry Pi's.

Unless you're doing very computationally intensive work a cluster isn't going to really much of an advantage to you.

Sent from my BlackBerry using Tapatalk

[n25an]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

what you are thinking is mosix
or this
windows hpc cluster
or
linux distro hpc cluster for research purposes

interesting but still not what I am looking for...

[n25an]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

grudgingly I think you are right... although I am not looking to create a garbage supercomputer... it seems thats the direction I am headed in...
beowulf... seems to be the direction... I am headed in...
wulf-2.jpg

[rthonpm]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

The only systems I've seen, other than OEM custom builds, with a backplane are servers, and those are generally purpose built for the system.

Consumer grade equipment just doesn't support that type of use case. The closest I've seen to what you're looking to do is maybe an HBA card that allows a passthrough to storage, but that still needs to be detected by the local system board.

Sent from my BlackBerry using Tapatalk

[n25an]

Re: Slaving An Old Pc

relax... this was a shot in the dark... this is one of those things that if it does exist... everyone may not know anything about it... me being one of them... so I threw this out to the community... to see what sticks and to kinda get the mind flowing...

thanks for the info...
and relax this isn't jeopardy...
just 20 questions...