Messages in this thread | | | From | Peter Fox <> | Subject | Re: CONFIG_PNP: Please change the name | Date | Wed, 20 Mar 1996 21:32:39 GMT |
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Bernd Eckenfels <ukd1@rzstud1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> wrote: > Mike Kilburn (duxmike@iafrica.com) wrote: > > One of our engineers is busy adding PnP to our ISA WAN board. He thought > > the system was quite nice. After reading the specs from Intel, I also > > thought is was a good system. Why do you think its useless? I would > > be very interested in any pitfalls you are aware of.
> The biggets problem is mixing new with old hardware. The simplest problem is > using isa cards in PNP PCI Systems. You have no chance to tell the PNP Cards > how they should configure themself if the make wrong asumptions. The > Resources for ISA Cards need to be reserved in the Bios Setu which is not > always woking correctly or easy to do. Another Problem is, that > Softconfigured Cards require Support from special OSes to even make them > Run. I like Jumpers on a card much more, there I can actually see and be > sure whats going on. The Problem ist not the PNP itself, but the mixture > with non PNP Components, the Software Requirements and the Bios Extensions.
> A good Example are the new Teles 1.3 ISDN Cards. You can configure them > only under Windows or dos, and you can only stick two of them in one system > cause they have only 2 config-ports.
> Of course PNP is very helpfull (Eisa, MCA, PCI) if it works right... the > question is... does it work right? :)
I've written a (fairly crude) utility to configure PnP ISA cards which you may find helpful. It doesn't configure the DMA or Memory parts yet as I didn't need them, but if there's any demand I could fix that fairly easily. It allows you to configure a cards IO address(es) and interrupts, then activate it so it will respond to accesses. I use it in my rc files to enable my internal fax/modem card.
See ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/unix/linux/utils/isapnptools-1.0.tgz
For example my config file looks like this:
# LD n = Logical device, ie write to reg 7 # IO n = IO descriptor n # BASE n = IO/Mem address # INT n = Interrupt req n # IRQ n = Interrupt level # MODE = line levels etc # ACT = Activate
#(debug) (IGNORECRC) (READPORT 0x3bb) (ISOLATE) (IDENTIFY *) (CONFIGURE DFX0000/1493 (LD 0 (IO 0 (BASE 0x3e8)) (INT 0 (IRQ 12 (MODE +E))) (ACT Y))) (WAITFORKEY)
-- Peter Fox
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