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Re: [linux-mac68k] Re: PowerBook 540c



Brad Boyer wrote:
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:00:32AM +0200, Erik C.J. Laan wrote:

One area I think Linux/mac68k is lacking is SCSI DMA support on the NCR53c9x. This makes these machines quite slow. If you can help out with that is would be great, although the Linux/mac68k status page tells me your PB540c has a NCR5380. Someone did write (some parts?) of the SCSI-DMA driver for that.

Actually, only a few models have a real DMA engine. The AV models have
the PSC doing DMA for the NCR53c94 chip, which has been partially
documented, but not coded. The IIfx has a custom version of the NCR5380
with a DMA engine, but I couldn't get the driver stabilized. I haven't
tried with the 2.6 code yet, because it doesn't even work in PIO mode
on my IIfx in recent versions. I have the docs laying around for SCSI-DMA
on the IIfx, but I don't think they're 100% accurate.

All other models have to use either PIO or PDMA. The mac_scsi driver
implemented PDMA for most models with the NCR5380, but I don't remember
anyone updating the mac_esp driver to get PDMA on NCR53c9x based models.

Ah, that's it, sorry I wasn't specific enough. I meant PDMA (Pseudo-DMA right?). This makes the 5380 based Mac's much more enjoyable compared to the 53c9x based ones. At least that is what I've been told by happy owners of 5380 based machines when PDMA was introduced...

At this moment my 53c9x based Mac (Quadra650) is doing another testrun with the new debian-installer. This takes me about 8 to 16 hours. This is partly due to having little memory (only 24 Mb), and partly due to the slowness of the SCSI-driver. If PDMA can speed this up it would save everybody quite some time with al their Linux/Mac68k related work.

Erik.
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Erik C.J. Laan				elaan at dds.nl
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