On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, kiran keshava wrote:
> What exactly were the changes U made to the space.c file when U
> added those extra 4-port NICs. I'm planin on puttin six 4-port(Matrox)
> ethernet cards on my Linux box. Still have'nt got the cards but will get
> them soon, so I wanted to know as much as I can before hand.
You might have five or six PCI slots, but most low-end motherboards don't
have unique bus-master control lines for all six. And each four-port card
needs its own bus-master signals.
Most workstation-oriented chipsets only have four sets of bus master pins.
If there is an on-board bus master device that leaves signals for only three
PCI slots.
In the past some motherboards would have "slave" PCI slots that wouldn't get
bus master signals. With PCI v2.0 all slots are supposed to be bus-master
capable. The sleazy loophole is to "share" the signals between two slots,
so that each is nominally master capable, but you can't plug bus masters
into both slots simultaneously.
High-end motherboards, especially motherboards with 64 bit slots, have PCI
bus bridges connecting the additional slots. A bus bridge usually provides
four additional bus master lines.
Donald Becker
Scyld Computing Corporation, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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