Subject: Re: Compact FLASH - success?
To: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
From: Stefan Grefen <grefen@hprc.tandem.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 11/04/1998 10:50:56
In message <19981104100753.36059@pyy.jmp.fi>  Jukka Marin wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 04, 1998 at 08:58:39AM +0100, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> > > Some time ago there was discussion about using Compact FLASH solid state
> 
> > No, I've not been able to make mine work.  I managed to fix the freezing
> > by handling errors in the PCMCIA code instead of just ignoring them.
> > But I couldn't get the cards to work, even after increasing some timeouts
> > as was suggested to me.
> 
> Hmm, odd.  I have used CF cards in my custom hardware design and they work
> just fine (and the software driver was quite trivial).  The only problem
> I had with the SanDisk CF cards was that the card enable signal (/CE1 in
> my case) must not fall before /RD and /WR are valid.  In my design, this
> wasn't the case and I had to add a few logic gates in the /CE1 signal
> path to delay it a few nanoseconds.
> 
> I can use these CF cards under win95 with an ISA / PCMCIA adapter card
> without problems, so I think the timing requirement isn't too weird.  I
> haven't tried this adapter with NetBSD because this machine has a small
> disk with no room for NetBSD..
> 
> What did the cards do after you fixed the PCMCIA code error handling?

Hmm, I guess you don't use COMPAQ machines and an ISA/PCMCIA adapter (this
will fail on some machines and you need to use a memory mapped instead
of IO-mapped wdc driver ...)

I'm using CF cards for some time now and never had any problems like those.
For the cards to not become ready, I think it doesn't get enough power
(eg. 3.3V instead of 5V), charles had 'fix' I think for some pcic clones.
My only significant difference to -current is that I ignore entries where
cfe->iospace[1].start == 0 (but his shouldn't matter as this is way
after probing).


And it works on my libretto and an isa/pcmcia adapter.
The disks are 2MB and 16MB.

Stefan
> 
>   -jm
> 

--
Stefan Grefen                                Tandem Computers Europe Inc.
grefen@hprc.tandem.com                       High Performance Research Center
 --- Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge. ---