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 tjroberts at lucent.com ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/
