Re: Current Debian m68k in Amiga
Hello Adrian,
2015-08-26 11:31 GMT+02:00 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>:
> It took my quite a while to find a compatible one. This is attributed
> to the fact that the Linux kernel uses a different PCMCIA stack on
> the Amiga as compared to standard x86 PCs which means that most PCMCIA
> drivers the Linux kernel support unfortunately don't work on the
> Amiga running Linux.
>
> Someone with enough time needs to port the modern and common PCMCIA
> stack of the Linux kernel to the Amiga.
Actually, the PCMCIA stack is not the only or most problematic issue.
A big problem is that the current Amiga interrupt handler doesn't
support interrupts from the Gayle chip transparently to the drivers,
so all existing drivers need special code for it. I once wrote a new
interrupt handling system for the Amiga port, but never got around to
clean it up enough so it could be included in the kernel.
The more important issue is hardware related. A lot of cards simply
won't work because the Gayle PCMCIA implementation probably doesn't
completely conform to the standard. As soon as you insert such a card,
the Amiga completely hangs. Other cards won't respond to IO cycles or
only to some. These issue will always be there, even with a new PCMCIA
stack.
I had two types of cards working on my Amiga, some NE2000 clone based
(the old pcnet_cs driver), and a 3Com card (forgot the type).
If/when I find the time, I might revisit my old sources and rework
them. I'm guessing they won't rebase cleanly after this many years
;-).
Kind regards,
Kars.
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