Subject: Re: Query: PCI and Ethernet hardware/drivers

From: Tom Roberts <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 11:25:42 -0600

Adrian Cox wrote:
> Tom Roberts wrote:
> > 1) Does Linux/PPC handle the PCI bus properly?
> Short answer, yes. Long answer, how strange a PCI system do you want to
> build?

Nothing obscure, I hope. We need a local PCI bus to interface to
two ethernet MACs, some HDLC interfaces, and the H.110 telephony bus
(Lucent has a part which directly interfaces H.110 to PCI). While these
other devices will be PCI masters (for DMA), they are all quite dumb
and will be programmed from our 7410s (Linux).

> Does this mean that your board is intended to be a PCI agent?

I don't think so. There will be no other CPUs on the PCI bus, just
peripherals. But we want them to DMA into our big memory.

> > 4) We favor a 4-CPU SMP configuration. What not-so-obvious problems
> >    are we likely to face?
> Designing a good interrupt controller.

We have done this for our current boards, but they have no PCI bus,
only local peripherals directly connected to a 60x or MAX bus. "good"
to us merely means it works reliably; we have only rather low data
rates as this is primarily a compute engine -- 200 kilobytes/sec
would be a high data rate to us (during boot it will be higher).

Thank you very much for your quick response.

Tom Roberts	[email-masked]

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