linux-apus-devel

Drivers situation

[Giorgio T. <de...@ip...>]

Hi,
this is the second episode of my last mail concerning IOBlix driver,
i wish to inform you that i shall try to write the parallel drivers
of the same card (LP & PLIP) because they seems quite simple 
(not easy).
But i shall delay them because of Italy's summer weather: i have not 
the air conditioning in my apartment and the off-limits programming
is not in my philosophy ;-). 

Jokes apart.
I wish to have some informations about Cyberstorm SCSI driver
and Buddha IDE driver.
1) Is anyone working on Cyberstorm SCSI ? 
   Nicholai said to me months ago that nobody was working on it.
   The situation is changed or not ?  
2) Buddha IDE driver has a problem on my computer: when reboot
   it locks the process of restart and i must switch off the machine
   and then (naturally) on. This problem is described in its docs in 
   the kernel's source block devices directory, but i wish to know 
   if there is someone that is improving it.
   I have tried to remove the $FC0 write instruction because ,as of
   that docs, it is used only with buggy hardware. The driver ignored
   my modify continuing to work normally after the new kernel's 
   compilation and bootstrap, but the reboot problem still remains.     
   Do you know something about ? 
   Any suggestion ?

Thanks

P.S. Dear Michel, thank you for the patch manager suggestion,
     i am a sort of "caveman" about Mailing List services :-) .
     
 
-- 
                                                 Giorgio Terzi

Re: Drivers situation

[Michel <dae...@st...>]

Giorgio Terzi wrote:

> i wish to inform you that i shall try to write the parallel drivers
> of the same card (LP & PLIP) because they seems quite simple
> (not easy).

Cool, good luck!


> 1) Is anyone working on Cyberstorm SCSI ?
>    Nicholai said to me months ago that nobody was working on it.
>    The situation is changed or not ?

Fred Heitka is working on it but unfortunately hasn't had much success. Please
join my efforts to make him contribute the code to the CVS repository :)

(BTW Giorgio: Sign up at SourceForge and mail me your username privately so I
can add you to the project and you can commit your changes yourself).


> P.S. Dear Michel, thank you for the patch manager suggestion,
>      i am a sort of "caveman" about Mailing List services :-) .

No problem, you'd be the first to use the Patch Manager ;)


Michel


-- 
I'm so hungry, I could almost eat health food.
______________________________________________________________________________
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)  \  CS student and free software enthusiast
Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc,i386) user \   member of XFree86, Team *AMIGA*, AUGS

Re: Drivers situation

[Ken T. <ke...@we...>]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Michel [iso-8859-1] Dänzer wrote:

> > 1) Is anyone working on Cyberstorm SCSI ?
> >    Nicholai said to me months ago that nobody was working on it.
> >    The situation is changed or not ?
> 
> Fred Heitka is working on it but unfortunately hasn't had much success. Please
> join my efforts to make him contribute the code to the CVS repository :)

I thought I might have been able to help Fred a little but the code is
very different from the 53c7xx driver that I've looked at.

But,

Richard Hirst is working on a 770 driver (Not Amiga) that is about two
weeks away.

I had a hacked together sim710 driver for the 4091 (and all the amiga7xx.c
cards) but 'mispalaced' it, now having another go - properly this time,
and I'll continue to try to get my 4091 to work reliably.

(neither sim710 or 53c7xx drivers work reliably on PPC & (A4091 | A4000T)
scsi combination but seem OK on everything else - bugger!).

Ken

Re: Drivers situation

[Michel <dae...@st...>]

Ken Tyler wrote:

> Richard Hirst is working on a 770 driver (Not Amiga) that is about two
> weeks away.

Hey great - as I said in my previous post: Rock & Roll :)


Now let's dream of times to come when the USCSI on Cyberstorms is finally
supported and thousands and millions of happy CS users will be using Linux ;)


Michel


-- 
/etc/passwd is full -- go away!
______________________________________________________________________________
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)  \  CS student and free software enthusiast
Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc,i386) user \   member of XFree86, Team *AMIGA*, AUGS

Re: Drivers situation

[<fh...@at...>]

In <Pin...@en...>, on
07/05/00 
   at 08:22 AM, Ken Tyler <ke...@we...> said:



>On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Michel [iso-8859-1] D nzer wrote:

>> > 1) Is anyone working on Cyberstorm SCSI ?
>> >    Nicholai said to me months ago that nobody was working on it.
>> >    The situation is changed or not ?
>> 
>> Fred Heitka is working on it but unfortunately hasn't had much success. Please
>> join my efforts to make him contribute the code to the CVS repository :)

Actually my last name is "Heitkamp".   I have yet to get the driver to
pass the cache test.  I am not sure what is wrong, but Ken seems to think
the CPU cache is getting in the way.  I have let the pieces that reserve
the I/O space alone.  The driver uses check_region/request_region to
reserve I/O space for the kernel, but that doesn't seem to allow the SCSI
chip to access memory properly.  What I plan to do next is use the bits
out of the 53C7xx driver to see if that makes any difference, unless
someone has a better idea. 

>I thought I might have been able to help Fred a little but the code is
>very different from the 53c7xx driver that I've looked at.

Yes the code is written in a completely different style from that of the
53c7xx driver but it appears to be a close cousin of the  driver used in
the sym53c8xx driver, which is used for a number of  cards for the PC. 
Alas they are all ISA or PCI cards.  I am trying to  find someone who can
tell me the major differences between
accessing cards on the Amiga vs. the PC.  If the driver ever does get to
work, I would eventually like to see it combined with the sym53c8xx.c in
order to take advantage of the active development. If that's all possible
of course.

Fred

Re: Drivers situation

[Michel <da...@re...>]

fh...@at... wrote:

> >> > 1) Is anyone working on Cyberstorm SCSI ?
> >> >    Nicholai said to me months ago that nobody was working on it.
> >> >    The situation is changed or not ?
> >>
> >> Fred Heitka is working on it but unfortunately hasn't had much success.
> >> Please
> >> join my efforts to make him contribute the code to the CVS repository :)
> 
> Actually my last name is "Heitkamp".

Oops, my apologies.


> I have yet to get the driver to pass the cache test.

What do you think about Richard Hirst's new driver Ken mentioned?


Michel


-- 
It is easier to fix Unix than to live with NT.
______________________________________________________________________________
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)  \  CS student and free software enthusiast
Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc,i386) user \   member of XFree86, Team *AMIGA*, AUGS

Re: Drivers situation

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000 fh...@at... wrote:
> Actually my last name is "Heitkamp".   I have yet to get the driver to
> pass the cache test.  I am not sure what is wrong, but Ken seems to think
> the CPU cache is getting in the way.  I have let the pieces that reserve
> the I/O space alone.  The driver uses check_region/request_region to
> reserve I/O space for the kernel, but that doesn't seem to allow the SCSI
> chip to access memory properly.  What I plan to do next is use the bits
> out of the 53C7xx driver to see if that makes any difference, unless
> someone has a better idea. 

{check,request}_region() just mark that that region is in use by a driver, it
doesn't allow access itself.

Since you're speaking about request_region(), this sounds like the chip uses
PCI I/O space? And to access PCI I/O space you have to know where PCI (ISA) I/O
space is mapped (isa_io_base). AFAIK, it doesn't exist on APUS.

Now forget the previous paragraph, since the 53c7xx is not for PCI! AFAIK it's
meant to be connected directly to the CPU bus. Hence you should not use
request_region() at all, but request_mem_region(). And to make everything I
said above even more useless: you don't need request_mem_region() to get
anything to work neither (but you do want request_mem_region() later).

> Yes the code is written in a completely different style from that of the
> 53c7xx driver but it appears to be a close cousin of the  driver used in
> the sym53c8xx driver, which is used for a number of  cards for the PC. 
> Alas they are all ISA or PCI cards.  I am trying to  find someone who can
> tell me the major differences between

Not only on the PC. I have a plain sym53c875 PCI card in my CHRP box, which
works fine (17 MB/s on my Quantum Viking II).

> accessing cards on the Amiga vs. the PC.  If the driver ever does get to

On PC, the sym53c8xx driver can use both PCI I/O space and PCI memory space,
configurable through a CONFIG_* option. On some platforms only one of them
work fine.

On Amiga, you should just read/write to the correct memory addresses.

> work, I would eventually like to see it combined with the sym53c8xx.c in
> order to take advantage of the active development. If that's all possible
> of course.

Should be possible, since 53c7xx and 53c8xx are close cousins.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP} -- ge...@li...

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Drivers situation

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Giorgio Terzi wrote:
> 2) Buddha IDE driver has a problem on my computer: when reboot
>    it locks the process of restart and i must switch off the machine
>    and then (naturally) on. This problem is described in its docs in 
>    the kernel's source block devices directory, but i wish to know 
>    if there is someone that is improving it.
>    I have tried to remove the $FC0 write instruction because ,as of
>    that docs, it is used only with buggy hardware. The driver ignored
>    my modify continuing to work normally after the new kernel's 
>    compilation and bootstrap, but the reboot problem still remains.     
>    Do you know something about ? 
>    Any suggestion ?

All I know is in the README. I wrote the driver according to the README, and
that's it (I don't have a Buddha or Catweasel).

I think you best ask the manufacturer of the Buddha. His email is somewhere in
the README.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP} -- ge...@li...

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds