Re: pcmcia ethernet card support for m68k?
On Mon, 10 Aug 2020, Brad Boyer wrote:
>
> There was a discussion of the driver for PCMCIA support on the PB190
> back in November 2009, but I don't believe anything was ever completed.
At the time, Diego Cousinet sent me an unfinished trex patch for the
2.6.31 kernel but we never got it working with my Farallon card. I think
he did some more work on this in 2011 but I've not kept in touch.
> There's old code that worked for some cards back then, but it would need
> to be updated to a current kernel, and even then probably needs some
> work to get accepted.
>
Right.
ISTR the 190 and 5300 did have an optional infrared port. Unfortunately
the IRDA stack got removed from Linux in v4.17.
I've been working on other issues because the Powerbook 190 is limited to
40 MB of RAM (and that upgrade is probably unobtainable/unaffordable now).
Another limitation of the 190 is the missing FPU, which means the CPU has
to emulate those instructions which is slow. The FPU emulation in Linux is
incomplete and the end result is that you can't run 'fio' for example.
The way I see it, implementing Localtalk support, better FPU emulation or
any of a dozen other issues would be more rewarding because that might
help with lots of Mac models (particularly those with more RAM).
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