Soren Kristensen wrote: > Hi Everybody, > > After investigating the problems with some CompactFlash cards we have > found out:
Soren, Fist thanks for doing this. Additional comments within. > There are a number of CF cards that don't follow the ATA specs regarding > to RESET line behavior, more specific, they totally ignore the RESET > line.... > > There are two issues with that when using those CF cards in a net5501: > > 1) The "set flash=primary|secondary" setting is done by setting the CSEL > (cable select) line to master or slave and then issue a reset. The CF > card are then supposed to reset and recognize the new CSEL setting. > > CF cards that don't do that will just use the hardware default. In early > net5501 that was slave, we changed that to master so at least non > standard CF cards could be used in the most common way. Was the change a hardware change or a firmware change? Is there a known serial number when this change was made? I have several net5501's ranging from the first production batch to units shipped in February. A majority of these are using Transcend Industrial CF cards. One recognizes the card as Primary Master. The three more recent units all recognize the cards as Primary Slave. Is there a chance that after a reboot, the net5501 would read a Primary Master as Primary Slave? If so that's a huge potential issue for me. > 2) Some boards have a problem with a short glitch on the DASP line. That > shouldn't normally matter as we do a RESET afterwards, but again some CF > cards ignore the RESET line.... If the CF card is master it will then > wait 32 seconds for the slave response and if that is not present then > the BIOS will time out and not recognize the CF card. > > We will implement a hardware workaround for the glitch in future > production series but the non standard CF cards will of course still > only be master. This is fine as long as the cards are recognized the same way each time the system reboots. > If a CF card cannot be set to slave then it do not follow the ATA > standard and are not recommended to be used in Soekris boards. > > We recommend to use Sandisk CF cards as they seems to always follow the > specs and therefore work as expected. Thanks again. Darrick -- Darrick Hartman DJH Solutions, LLC http://www.djhsolutions.com http://www.djhsolutions.com/wiki _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
