From owner-freebsd-hardware Wed Jul 22 16:34:17 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA19574 for freebsd-hardware-outgoing; Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:34:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from ece.arizona.edu (ece1.ece.arizona.edu [128.196.28.166]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA19496 for ; Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:34:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john@ece.arizona.edu) Received: from burdell.ece.arizona.edu by ece.arizona.edu (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id QAA01887; Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:30:36 -0700 Received: by burdell.ece.arizona.edu (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id QAA10025; Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:31:31 -0700 Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:31:31 -0700 From: john@ece.arizona.edu (John Galbraith) Message-Id: <199807222331.QAA10025@burdell.ece.arizona.edu> To: randal@comtest.com CC: dufault@hda.com, mike@smith.net.au, FreeBSD-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: <199807221926.JAA23230@oldyeller.comtest.com> (randal@comtest.com) Subject: Re: new GPIB driver Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org >>>>> "Randal" == Randal S Masutani writes: Randal> Thanks John. I will be glad to work with you on your Randal> driver. My customer has signed the non-disclosure with NI Randal> for their TNT controller chip and will hopefully get some Randal> docs soon(but I've been waiting for over a month now. Very Randal> typical of NI I suppose.) OK, but if he signed a NDA, we can't exactly use that info in the driver, and distribute it all over the planet. At least not according to the agreement. If he wants to give me or you the information, it seems to be a legal risk (and rightly so) for your customer. Randal> I need to have NI 488.2 library interface for the project Randal> I am working on. Currently I am only required to Randal> implement about 10 functions from NI's library and that's Randal> all I have time for, due to my deadline. I am currently Randal> working on getting it working with Freds code. Randal> From your last email I take it that you haven't Randal> implemented any of NI's 488.2 library calls? So do you Randal> have a similar interface to Freds code? Yeah, it uses ioctl() calls. They are quite similar. It didn't take me more than a few minutes to convert my code from the stock driver to mine. If I had thought about it more, I could have just left them identical (except I would have to add a bunch). Another difference between his and my driver is how he uses the minor numbers. He likes to be able to open minor device 4, and write() to a device on the GPIB bus at address 4. This is sometimes useful, granted, but I personally don't even need to write to a GPIB printer or anything this way. Instead, I use the minor number as a card index, so I can have multiple cards in the machine at the same time. This may not be very common in real life, but I anticipate this being very useful for debugging the driver itself. I don't know any other way to actually measure the GPIB transfer rate. Maybe there is some special equipment available, but I don't have it. In any case, it would be trivial to write a program that would direct raw data directly to a specific device on the GPIB without any controller functions included. It just struck me that I could have the lower minor numbers work like Fred's driver, and some upper number (like 32) to be the main special file that you would open when you just wanted to dump data directly to a specific device. Not a big deal for now, though. Right now, I haven't even implemented write() and read(), other than to return the "system call not implemented" error. I will be hacking on this tonight, unless I get called off on some social errand... John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message