What ISA hardware is integrated into m68k bridges

Hi Geert,

A discussion is underway with respect to the future of the various ISA drivers[1], and Alan suggested checking with the m68k folks:

Check with the M68K people however. 3c501 won't matter to them but I'm not sure which of the other chips ended up on Amiga ISA bridges. I know NE2000 clones did.

I know you've currently got that "almost ne2k" driver that runs IRQ-less. Are there other "ISA-like" onboard devices in the M68k harware scope that rely on existing (x86) ISA drivers?

Thanks,
Paul.

[1] http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/160144/

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Paul,

Not sure it's still considered ISA based in its current state, but the smc91x is another one used on Atari. That one's got an interrupt though, and I had confirmation that it works fine from a user just a few days ago.

You mentioned the IRQ-less ne2k already - making that one run on netpoll has stalled for now because I'm too busy at work. Neither driver has been merged mainstream yet.

Most of the Amiga cards are 8390 or Lance based IIRC (there's a Lance based Atari driver as well!) but these do not share code with the ISA Lance drivers as far as I can see. Geert may know more details.

Cheers,

Michael

That thread makes it pretty clear that you don't like the presence of a certain NIC driver, because you don't like limited hardware, and because you personally have no need of neither.

But, nowhere in that thread is there any reason given for piecemeal ISA
removal: Alan asked "So, should we dump ISA?" after suggesting "Removing [the NIC driver] because nobody is running one even in a museum might be a good reason".

So, I wonder, how will you ascertain that there are no users of this code you've targetted?

Finn

Thanks Michael for the level headed on-topic reply, I appreciate it. That smc is used by 20-odd arm defconfigs, so it really isn't valid to consider it as a stand alone ISA card used just by older x86 hardware with ISA bus. In fact I'm not sure it ever shipped as a standalone ISA card...

Paul.

Hi Paul,

IIRC, the only m68k machines (supported by Linux) with ISA slots are:
- Q40/Q60, probably used with NE2000 cards only,
- Various Amiga bridgeboards, none of which are supported,
- Apollo DN, used with a 3Com 3c505 ISA Ethernet card (preferably the version with an Apollo boot ROM), but the (changes to the existing) driver never entered mainline, witnessed by the orphan APOLLO_ELPLUS config option we removed a few years ago.

Apart from that, several "ISA" (Ethernet) chips were/are used, as typically that's
the simplest solution to add peripheral support to a CPU local bus using a minimum of glue logic.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [email protected]

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

Hi Paul,

Just the infamous NE2000 clone then for Atari (RTL8019AS is what it reads on the ISA card hanging off the ROM port of my Falcon).

Cheers,

Michael