Subject: pci-pcmcia bridges/adapters

From: Pete Popov <[email-masked]>
Date: 20 Mar 2002 20:00:54 -0800

Has anyone gotten a pci-pcmcia adapter card to work with any 16 bit
pcmcia card in it on mips linux?

Pete

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From: "Steven J. Hill" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:17:30 -0600

> pcmcia card in it on mips linux?
Your first priority should be to look at the main PCMCIA page for
Linux and find a PCI adapter that has a supported chipset, otherwise
you are wasting your time. I bought a PCI->PCMCIA adapter from LinkSys
for one of my wireless cards and the driver never worked, so my
experience has not been good. 

-Steve

-- 
 Steven J. Hill - Embedded SW Engineer

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From: Pete Popov <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Mar 2002 10:22:43 -0800

> experience has not been good. 

I don't really have a choice in adapters, but the one that I'm working
with, Ricoh R5C478 is supported just fine by the yenta driver.  The card
I'm trying to get to work is a 16 bit wireless card based on the prismII
chipset. The card by itself works fine in another mips board for which I
wrote a socket driver.  But I'm having a hell of a time with the
pci-pcmcia bridge _and_ the card behind it.  Attribute memory accesses
do work -- they get passed to the card by the bridge and the card is
recognized. But the ExCA register definition, which the bridge must
support, allows for this "Optional memory window x upper byte of start
address".  It is this optional register that allows me to setup the 32
bit pci memory address. The IO windows registers, on the other hand,
allow you to setup 16 bit addresses only.  So I can't figure out how I
can put a 32 bit pci address on the bus, and have the bridge forward
that address to the 16 bit pcmcia card.

If there's any experts in this field, I would appreciate some input.

Pete

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From: Dan Malek <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 14:21:29 -0500

Steven J. Hill wrote:

> ....of my wireless cards and the driver never worked, so my

I have been working with quite a few wireless cards in embedded
systems and have discovered they are quite sensitive to reset
after power up.  The power-on, reset, first access to the card
seems to have some timing considerations that some socket drivers
can handle better than others.  Before you assume the bridge and
its related software are at fault, try a variety of cards not
sensitive to this, like a CF in a PCMCIA adapter.  I got burned
by this again yesterday :-).

	-- Dan