Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 11:23:37 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: fenner@parc.xerox.com (Bill Fenner) Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: PCI plug-n-play on Intel Premiere Baby II? Message-ID: <199504191823.LAA02984@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <95Apr19.102557pdt.49864@crevenia.parc.xerox.com> from "Bill Fenner" at Apr 19, 95 10:25:54 am
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> > In message <199504190737.AAA01354@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> you write: > >This board is also, I believe, called the Intel Plato card, check you > >user manual to see if it says Plato in it. > > It says "Plato?" in my handwriting on the cover =) The inside doesn't say > much about anything... but that reminded me that the Plato bios upgrades that > sometimes show up on wuarchive work, so... > > >What version of the BIOS does the motherboard have on it? > > I was using 1.00.10, I just upgraded to 1.00.12 and it doesn't look any > different, either in the setup or in how it assigns interrupts. Okay, so we now know it is a Plato board, and you are at the latest BIOS revision as far as we can tell. This is good. > >They also left you with very little flexiability in what you could do > >to stop cards from sharing an interrupt. > > I guess I just don't know enough about PCI, but I found it pretty odd that > the NCR SCSI card still got int A even though it was jumpered to B. The motherboard BIOS is the final ruler here. It is the one that sets the PCI interrupt value register. Since your NCR controller has no BIOS on it there is no way for it to tell the motherboard BIOS to use interrupt B. (Unless you happen to have one of the Acculogic or other NCR based controllers with a BIOS chip on it). On boards using the Award BIOS you can set this in the PCI setup screen, Intel decided that this was not necessary, and that there code would be the ruler here. Allowed by PCI spec, done by Intel, but bad for the user :-(. > >Basically this was one of the first PCI P54C-90 motherboards on the market > >and I talked it down then, and still tell people to avoid it if they can. > > Okay, so, at least I have a CPU, can you reccomend a nice replacement > motherboard? (Preferably with built-in 2x16550 and parallel and floppy/ide > since I only have one free slot right now...) I thought that it was working for you? If you are running, and you are happy with the performance, so be it. As far as a recommendation, the ASUS PCI/I-P54TP4 is a good board (though I might be down grading that depending on some recent things told to me that I have yet to be able to verify). It has the built in ports, and dual EIDE channels. > > >If you have set the jumper on the NCR card to interrupt B, this motherboard > >will never see the interrupt from that card as far as I can tell. > > Sigh. I can't figure out how to tell if the NCR has fallen back to polling. > Neither dmesg nor ncrcontrol seems to say. (although ncrcontrol -dp says > 57 interrupts, implying that it might be getting interrupts -- or those might > be de interrupts mis-dispatched, I guess) What version of FreeBSD are you running? What does vmstat -i show? Though shared interrupts are not ideal, my understanding is that the PCI code in FreeBSD now deals with it. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Custom computers for FreeBSD
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