Re: pci support ?!

["Iggy Drougge" <optimus%canit.se@localhost>]

Jose Andias skrev:

> Hello all,
>  I would like to install NetBSD but I am currentlly using a pci extension in
>  my A1200, a mediator with a Voodoo 3000 and an Ethernet card. My question
>  is if NetBSD supports any pci on amiga, especially if I could work with my
>  ethernet card, wich would be very usefull! :)  For what i read Im stuck...
>  Is this right?! Thanks

Unless you're ready to do a lot of reverse-engineering, the Mediator is a no-
go. Getting docs from ELBOX requires signing an NDA, and that's very
incompatible with a BSD licence. I suppose you might release your own kernel
without the sources available, that would hopefully put ELBOX at peace, but it
couldn't be part of the official source tree.
OTOH, Harald Frank claims to have made a generic PCI library without help from
ELBOX, so it might yet be possible, without any obligations to said company,
but he might just be calling the Mediator's pci.library in turn, for all I
know. Bernd Meyer has also reverse-engineered the Meditator's PCI interface
for his Amithlon emulator, according to Meyer himself by looking at a freely
available GFX card driver, but that's going the other way around, mapping
Mediator calls onto a Linux PCI API (AFAI can tell). I can't really tell, but
you could turn to those two people for more info.
As for the other busboards, the makers of the Prometheus seem to be the most
open when it comes to documentation, whereas it seems difficult to get in
touch with DCE (G-Rex).
BTW, would it be feasible with an MI PCI implementation on the Mediator, what
with its (at least the A1200 version) strange behaviour WRT memory windows and
using the GFX card memory for DMA? One might have to settle for a Mediator-
specific implementation, much as with the Golden Gate ISA support in OpenBSD
(does NetBSD support the GG2+?).
But I'm no programmer, I'm just guessing. =)

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