Hi Nicolas, On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 21:04 +0200, Nicolas Boulay wrote: > Le lundi 11 Avril 2005 10:52, Daniel Phillips a �crit : > > On Saturday 09 April 2005 10:31, Timothy Miller wrote: > > > On Apr 9, 2005 9:52 AM, Philipp Klaus Krause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <...> > > > > If the PCI interface is in the FPGA the board will be more flexible > > > > for development - people might want to do their own PCI interface > > > > logic or use the OpenCores PCI bridge. > > > > > > Losing the PCI interface when reprogramming the FPGA was one of the > > > biggest COMPLAINTS. > > > > Not from me. My feeling is: if I load logic into the card that destroys > > the PCI interface, then I'll happily fall back to using the jtag > > interface. I'll just be careful not do mess that up too often, so as > > not to have to use the less convenient interface. I would not want to > > pay an extra, say $20, just to be unable to destroy the PCI interface. > > > > And what about not destroying your motherboard ?
One side effect of doing real hacking is that sometimes you break things. Hackers have a special name for this, we call it "fun". ;-) If you aren't hacking, no risk. If you are hacking, then you accept the risks. If you are a man on the street, you don't worry about this, because you only run stable code and we hackers test the code before we ship it. Losing the PCI interface on the card during configuration isn't much of an issue breakage-wise because it is trivial to make the connector pins go high impedance during config. The risk comes in if your PCI interface is broken, and even then I think real/permanent damage is unlikely. Most likely you would have to power cycle the machine to get the PCI bus back, and it's trivial to make the card always fall back to a known-safe FPGA image on power-up or reset. Trust me on this - I just finished schematic layout for a Xilinx based card for some audio stuff. :-) I will probably use the FPGA card in a sacrificial machine, as it would make me sad to lose my nice dual-Opteron motherboard. A cheap motherboard+CPU is actually cheaper than the card, so my real concern is that the card not blow up/overheat if I do something stupid. Cheers, Ray (Who just sent two 2GB microdrives to heaven by pushing them too hard) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
