Tom Roberts wrote:

1) Does Linux/PPC handle the PCI bus properly?

Short answer, yes. Long answer, how strange a PCI system do you want to
build?

2) Are there Linux/PPC drivers for the PLX 9054 (PCI interface) chip?
   (Yes, that is PPC 60x-bus, not MAX bus; the hardware will handle that)

I ported the 2.2 kernel to a board which used the very similar PLX 9080.
Does this mean that your board is intended to be a PCI agent? If so,
you've got a whole world of fun ahead of you, and you can ask me for
more details.

3) What Ethernet MAC chips have people had success using?
   (right now we favor an AMD chip, which they claim has Linux drivers,
   but their test plan includes only AMD and Intel CPUs, not PowerPC)

I've used a fully integrated AMD part.  Works fine, even if it's not the
world's cleverest ethernet chip.

4) We favor a 4-CPU SMP configuration. What not-so-obvious problems
   are we likely to face? (e.g. our simulations show that doing this
   at 133 MHz cannot be done using a CPLD-based memory controller:
   wimpy data-bus drivers (:-() Our existing boards are all non-SMP,
   and bus snooping is a bit of a mystery to us....

Designing a good interrupt controller.

- Adrian Cox

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