Hamish wrote:
On Saturday 01 July 2006 10:37, Dieter wrote:
no, itآ�s not the problem to have Eth ports on the PC side, as you notice
yourself _Dieter_ even low-end PC privide one port.
Rather, a chip on the PCآ�s mobo which route the PCI signal through
Ethernet.
(and on the monitor g-card, the contrary, though it could be not
necessarly to bother with a PCI slot, as you suggest)
Oh! I think I *finally* understand what you want. A PCI slot extender
that uses Ethernet for the link. Interesting idea. I don't know of such a
device. Anyone? The closest thing to this that I know of is a device for
adding more PCI slots or adding PCI slots to laptops. It looks like the
cable is limited to 1.5 meters. It is also expensive. For most purposes
one might as well buy an additional computer instead.
http://www.mycableshop.com/sku/PCI-P7T.htm
It might be that the PCI bus has timing/latency requirements that prevent
a remote slot over a long cable?
How long a cable do you want?
The pSeries (IBM rs6000) have remote IO drawers that attach via ahigh speed
serial cable. The drawers house anything up to about 10 PCI slots. The cables
can get pretty long (i.e. in another rack, which means a few metres. I guess
the specs would be online somewhere on IBM's website. probably the cabling &
devices manual.
I think the trick is that you don't need to extend the PCI bus itself. You
actually need a PCI Bridge that happens to have it's two halves at a distance
from each other.
Now whether you can chain a PCI bridge off a PCI slot is another matter. I
don't know if you can. So I may just be flapping my jaw here... (IRQ's would
be a limitation wouldn't they?)
I suspect that these are 'channels' (IBM speak). That is, there is
probably a CPU and DMA controller at the far end of the cable. In which
case, there would be no direct communication with the PCI buses in the
I/O drawer. This could be serial SCSI but this would still need the CPU
and DMA.
--
JRT
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