On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 03:15:52PM +1100, Malcolm Herbert wrote:
> I've got a notebook which the 1.5.2 GENERIC_LAPTOP kernel detects has a
> cardbus controller on it ... I've had a look in both the 'cardbus' and
> 'pcmcia' manual entries but I can't see how these differ ...

PCMCIA (PC-Card) is basicallly the ISA bus (ie the 8086 bus)
buffered out onto the socket pins.

CardBus is the PCI bus bridged out onto the socket pins.
(Indeed you can get a card that will bridge the PCI bus out
onto an external chassis, useful for adding cards to a laptop.)

The pinouts for the two busses bear almost no resemblance to
each other :-)

There is nothing to stop a system having a CardBus only slot...
However most PCI-CardBus bridge chips support PCMCIA cards.

One difficultly with 'hot plugging' CardBus cards is that the
system (probably) has to have reserved various bus resources
when the PCI bus was ennumerated - this isn't usually done.
You will find that many OS require that some cardbus cards
(any that reqire more than a trivial amount of IO and
memory space) be inserted at poweron, and not removed.


	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk