AW: PCI compatibility

Sacha Varma [mailto:sacha@ssl.co.uk] wrote:

I came across http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n16365 , a

1994 note

which discusses compatibility of PCI cards in general with

Macs/OpenFirmware.

It's quite terse but states that PCI cards that need to be active on boot
(video cards) will generally not work, and cards that don't generally

will.

OF needs some minimum hardware to operate, this can be some serial ports
or a keyboard and a framebuffer device. So an OF complient videocard should
include a minimum of OF code to set up such a device. Newer version
(new world rom) need acces to a storeage device, too. Older ones acces the
Apple ROMs.

. can anyone point me to more detailed resources?

This area of technotes is quite ok, your might look for
"Designing PCI cards and Drivers for Power Macintosh computers"

. what's the state of play 6 years on? is there a trend towards OF

compliance?
Dont know in general but there are a lot of videocrads for mac out there ...

. what does "active on boot" really mean?

See exaplanation above

. why can't a card be activated after boot, programmatically?

This is no problem. Any OS can load/apply a driver _later_ to acces
that card, but OF will know nothing about it (except some basic PCI
information)

. does anyone maintain a list of compatible PCI cards (of all types)?

For Linux ? For Mac OS ? ...

Greetings,

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