On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 08:10:13AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 riskin@esinosoft.com wrote:
I am migrating LinuxBIOS from vt5426 to PCChips M787CL( NB: VT8601 ,SB: VT82C686B),and I want to use ISA slot.I think that LinuxBIOS doesn't need to initialize ISA slot, the devices on ISA bus should work,but I am wrong.So does LinuxBIOS need to initialize the ISA slot?
You actually can't do much with that slot. ISA is a mess. There is no way for linuxbios to do anything because there are no configuration registers to read in ISA to help configure. So I am not sure what you should do.
The slot can't be configured, but the ISA bridge is on the PCI bus and thus configurable. If it's configured appropriately at least the ISA bus will be active. Whatever card is put in there will need further configuration however, and that's not really standardized. There are two common ways that I know of to do it, but neither is very good. One is scanning for extension ROMs, card ROMs may need a full PC BIOS. The other is ISA PnP that uses a couple of reserved ports for allocating resources to the cards. Linux can do Plug-and-Play configuration in kernel and in userspace.
//Peter