The ISA-project has been maturing considerably the last weeks.  An
offspring project has been to integrate Michael Hitch's interrupt
registration work and Markus Wild's INT6 remapping with a new dynamic
IPL lowering system.  What does this mean?  It means: for any device
generating an EXTER interrupt you can register another (lower) IPL
that you want the driver to run at, and rely on that it will work
safe.  This is especially worthwhile in the ISA environment where the
i386 drivers have had such possibilities since long.  This work is
still in beta-testing, but should rather soon be possible to
integrate into the baseline for testing by a wider audience.  The
latest ISA-kit supports the GoldenGate 2 (GG1 support is in there but
has never been tested) and the CrossLink.  Drivers known working is a
com driver (standard PC serial ports), an AST driver (a
multiserialport card), a lpt driver (standard PC parallel ports) and
an 8390 driver (an ethernet chip used by both SMC/WD, 3COM & Novell).
The 8390 driver (isaed) has been tested on NE2000's solely.
Performancewise the GG2 & a NE2000 card can get up to ~200KBps
transfer speed.  This could be improved by sacrificing the dynamic
binding between the bridgecard and the device-driver.  Today a driver
compiled as an LKM will work on any bridge without recompilation.
This is done by making all I/O via indirect calls which is expensive.
By using inline code the flexibility will be lost but speed could be
gained.  I'm not sure I will do this though, however, volunteers are
welcome to make a compile-time option that does this.

Anyway, I hope to be able to submit the current ISA-kit as soon as the
IPL-lowering system is accepted.  If it won't be accepted in any form,
I think I'll only distribute the kit in source form together with the
IPL-lowering code.

If someone want to have an easy task that will enhance the ISA-kit
even more, feel free to port the wd driver from the i386 tree.  It's
an IDE driver and could be quite useful, esp. for the CrossLink
owners.  Otherwise a little harder project would be to add VGA card
support.

Niklas

PS. I'm right now starting a sup to integrate the latest current
sources and hope to have the new ISA-kit available for beta-testers
this weekend.

Niklas Hallqvist	Phone: +46-(0)31-40 75 00
Applitron Datasystem	Fax:   +46-(0)31-83 39 50
Molndalsvagen 95	Email: niklas@appli.se
S-412 63  GOTEBORG	WWW:   Here
Sweden