Adrian Cox wrote:

Tom Roberts wrote:

quoted

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

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

Nothing obscure, I hope. We need a local PCI bus to interface to
two ethernet MACs, some HDLC interfaces, and the H.110 telephony bus
(Lucent has a part which directly interfaces H.110 to PCI). While these
other devices will be PCI masters (for DMA), they are all quite dumb
and will be programmed from our 7410s (Linux).

Does this mean that your board is intended to be a PCI agent?

I don't think so. There will be no other CPUs on the PCI bus, just
peripherals. But we want them to DMA into our big memory.

quoted

4) We favor a 4-CPU SMP configuration. What not-so-obvious problems
   are we likely to face?

Designing a good interrupt controller.

We have done this for our current boards, but they have no PCI bus,
only local peripherals directly connected to a 60x or MAX bus. "good"
to us merely means it works reliably; we have only rather low data
rates as this is primarily a compute engine -- 200 kilobytes/sec
would be a high data rate to us (during boot it will be higher).

Thank you very much for your quick response.


Tom Roberts	tjroberts@lucent.com

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