On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 01:25:04AM -0500, ZN wrote: > 2) How far does the design move from the GF implementation to an ISA (even > if only Q40/60 ISA) implementation. This impacts interrupt line routing and > base address selection (which in turn impacts the PnP initialization > values), 8/16 bit bus width selection for ethernet (probably this will be > 16 bit), local interrupt routing between UltraIO, Sound, Ethernet and > whatever else gets on the board. All of this also impacts Q40/60 linux > drivers if it deviates too much from regular ISA cards, but then, knowing > the Q40/60 implementation of ISA and designing speciffically for it (see 1 > above) might make things easyer both for Q40 and GF, even though some > existing Q40/60 Linux drivers may need slight modifications (It seems to me > the later should not be a problem, but I'm not involved with any aspect of > Q40/60 Linux so I simply can't be sure).
most Linux drivers will take io base addr and irq as parameters when required. 2.4 kernels also have builtin ISA PnP although the ISA cards should observe some constraints for this to work reliably. Eg no function other than ser should request irqs 3,4. Afair Q40/Q60 implements ISA irq 3-7,10/11,14,15. The 10/11 means the 2 can't be distinguished by reading the irq register. The basic functionality should work in SMSQ from the very beginning which means use the standard irq and io ports. PnP would be acceptable for added functionality like sound and ethernet as this can be configured when the system is up eg by isapnputils which should be easilly portable to QDOS. > 3) What additional stuff we want on this board - IDE, drivers for MIDI, CF > card... double or triple IDE, ethernet and some sound hardware, esp recording would be very nice. Of course there is much more that would be interesting, but don't drive the price higher for exotic features. having only 2 slots is pretty limiting and costs some money to overcome so the card would still be useful if its more expensive than the cheapest available PC stuff. Also beeing tested with Q40/Q60 is an advantage, we had a few NE2K cards that didn't work. If you consider the work involved in finding one, opening the case and testing it, it becomes quickly irelevant whether the card costs a few bucks more. Bye Richard
