LinuxBIOS and ISA slot on PCChips M787CL M/B

Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios at cdy.org
Fri Nov 14 09:51:01 CET 2003


On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 08:10:13AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 riskin at esinosoft.com wrote:
> 
> > I am migrating LinuxBIOS from vt5426 to PCChips M787CL( NB: VT8601 ,SB:
> > VT82C686B),and I want to use ISA slot.I think that LinuxBIOS doesn't
> > need to initialize ISA slot, the devices on ISA bus should work,but I am
> > wrong.So does LinuxBIOS need to initialize the ISA slot?
> 
> You actually can't do much with that slot. ISA is a mess. There is no way 
> for linuxbios to do anything because there are no configuration registers 
> to read in ISA to help configure. So I am not sure what you should do.

The slot can't be configured, but the ISA bridge is on the PCI bus and thus
configurable. If it's configured appropriately at least the ISA bus will be
active. Whatever card is put in there will need further configuration
however, and that's not really standardized. There are two common ways that
I know of to do it, but neither is very good.
One is scanning for extension ROMs, card ROMs may need a full PC BIOS.
The other is ISA PnP that uses a couple of reserved ports for allocating
resources to the cards. Linux can do Plug-and-Play configuration in kernel
and in userspace.


//Peter



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