Dealing With The Pci Bus - Rastergraf VFX-M User Manual

Rastergraf

5.2 Dealing with the PCI Bus

Because of the nature of the PCI protocol and the way support has been
implemented in the Operating Systems for PCI bus devices such as the
VFX-M, it is not possible to follow the same debugging strategies.
In fact, there are no address jumpers for these boards. Everything is
configured in software through a set of on-board registers, which control
the characteristics of the board as required by the PCI Specification.
The information used to program these registers is supplied to Operating
System (OS) specific functions by Rastergraf's software. Ordinarily,
several address map translations occur, including the CPU physical and
virtual address maps and the CPU to PCI bridge address map.
The result of this is that the operation of the VFX-M is very sensitive to
the host CPU, as no standards have been adopted which guarantee, or even
imply, universality among CPU boards, even if they use the same CPU
and PCI bridge. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that Rastergraf can vouch
for the board's operation in a particular CPU before you go crazy trying to
figure out why it doesn't. Please contact us (support@rastergraf.com or
541-923-5530) if you have problems.
5-30 Troubleshooting
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