PCMCIA

Hi again!

Maybe I frogot some information:

We need for a project a second 100MBit interface, so our soloution will be to use a PCMCIA card. Does there exists an actual compatibility list which cards works, which not? I only found a list from 2000 or 2001.

Please help :-)

We are using MPC860T with one possible PCMCIA port and Montavista kernel 2.4.2. So it is possible to use every PCMCIA card, which is supported by Linux?

Again, please help...

best regards
Gerhard

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Hi,

Not all cards worked "right out of the box" when I wrote the socket driver. And I don't think that all of them will work today either.
There are many things that might cause problems - endian unawareness, timing stuff etc.

So you will not be able to install a set of RPMs on your hardware and then just insert any PCMCIA card and hear bleep-bleep and everything works. No. But with some hacking and some knowledge of Linux and PCMCIA you will probably find out a collection of PCMCIA cards that will work ok.

I don't know how many PCMCIA cards that Linux/pcmcia-cs supports, but I guess that everyone uses CARDBUS today instead of PCMCIA. 32 bits are much more fun.

I think that I read that someone was planning on writing a list, but I don't remeber seeing any actual output. Or maybe I missed that.

There are (were anyhow) many things that differs between a common PC and the Linux implementation on a embedded powerpc box. The IDE stuff, serial ports and other things are treated different. And it all depends on the variant and version of your kernel. What fun.
And the status of your Montavista kernel - I have no idea.

Have you modified the socket driver to fit your hardware?
You will not be able to use any PCMCIA card without correct configuration.

Hope this leads you in the right direction.

/ magnus

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Why do you think you need a second 100MBit interface? The performance of a MPC8xx is a bit limited, so don't expect too much of throughput...

Probably a 10 Mbps interface on a SCC would be the easier solution.

I cannot speak about MV's 2.4.2 kernel, except that it's pretty old and I doubt it has full PCMCIA support. But the MPC860T supports _two_ PCMCIA slots.

You will not get any guarantees. Try it out. The (few!) network cards we tested so far worked fine.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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