Interesting +4, thanks a bundle! I still have this ISA-bridge card, which shows up as a device of some sort, to any OS. Are you suggesting that it is transparent, so the only configuration I should need to do is for the PCMCIA device plugged into it? Are you also suggesting that the bridge should work for a whole slew of PCMCIA cards? I'm not exactly sure how old the thing is, but I got it before it got branded "Orinoco", and was Lucent's first method for 802.11b on a desktop PC, iirc.
happy Sunday, BenB On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 13:31, Joseph Carter wrote: > On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 12:25:16PM -0800, Ben Barrett wrote: > > As a follow-up, does anyone have a concise and/or recent link on > > ISA-PCMCIA bridge support in Linux? I found a couple references, but > > nothing that was really helpful in instructing me to us one -- I have > > one of the old Lucent ones iirc, and have never been able to use my > > pcmcia 802.11b card with a desktop system. I since have it plugged into > > my access point, and the ISA bridge sits useless... someone please tell > > me it is not = ) > > PCMCIA is an ISA-based standard. Actually as it happens, PCMCIA is more > or less an IDE interface with some interesting tweaks. The devices on a > PCMCIA controller are typically integrated versions of what you'd plug in > to an ISA bus. ie, they talk over ports, use interrupts, and use DMA > channels. This reduced the development costs of PCMCIA cards. > > CardBus is an extension to the PCMCIA spec which allows for a bit of nice > multiplexing. The details I do not know for certain, but ISTR CardBus has > the equivalent of PCI channels, again allowing for people making them to > basically lift the logic from existing PCI devices and use it almost > wholesale in the CardBus devices. > > At some point, laptop makers decided PCMCIA sounded stupid and started > calling the things "PC Cards". This never caught on, but never really > went away, and many geeks still call what's on their laptops PCMCIA slots. > If your laptop was made in the past five years though, almost certainly > they are actually CardBus slots. Unless you're dealing with a PowerBook > or iBook, the CardBus controller still provides the equivalent of an ISA > bridge to talk to old PCMCIA cards. This isn't really a slowdown, unless > compared to using a CardBus device, which runs faster than 8MHz. > > > If you cannot use the PCMCIA device on a CardBus controller and you're not > running a Mac, I'd be surprised. > > > > PS - Yes, it is ISA, not PCI. Slows down the rest of the bus in a mixed > > PCI/ISA machine afaik. > > Every single PCI machine has an ISA bridge. Your keyboard and floppy > drives kinda depend on the ISA bus, after all. Most people depend at > least on these devices actually working at least some of the time. The > ISA side of an ISA-PCI bridge is only 8MHz, but this does not impact the > speed of the PCI bus. > > CardBus should not be any different. -- Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> counterclaim _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
