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From: rb6775@ehsn18.cen.uiuc.edu (Rafal Krzysztof Boni)
Subject: 8bit/16bit conflicts on ISA
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1993 16:49:18 GMT
Message-ID: <CB7026.M5B@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: usenet@news.cso.uiuc.edu (Net Noise owner)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
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I have recently been toying with a Ethernet driver for 3Com 3C507
[EtherLink/16] 16 bit ethernet card, and have some questions about
what exactly was resolved in the case of the WD/SMC 8013 and it's
conflicts with 8-bit memory-mapped devices.

The basic story [in my case] is this:

	My kernel boots up, probes the card, finds it and sets it up.
	I do whatever, play around, and then decide to reboot.
	I do "shutdown -r now" or "sync; sync;sync; reboot", the machine
	shuts down, begin a reboot, and I get two beeps from the BIOS/POST.
	I have nothing on the screen, and hitting F1 only causes several more
	beeps.  Pressing the reset key gets me back to the top of the scenario.
	The card config is this: IOmem at 0x300 - 0x30f, MappedMem at 0xd0000,
	MappedMem size is 64K.  IRQ is 15, but the same thing happens at IRQ 10
	and 12.  [And I know NOTHING is using any of the 3 IRQ's]

	I have a 486/33 localbus motherboard, with a localbus S3 911 card.  When
	this card is removed, the above scenario no longer applies, and things 
	work well again.  Could it be that a localbus card is using 8bit BIOS??
	[Or to restate: What the hell was the manufacturer smoking when this 
	card was made???What's the point of a 32bit card, if it uses 8-bit 
	BIOS??]

My questions:

	1. Could this be something else?? Manifest and all the other sys-diag
	utils I have report NO ROMs mapped in at anywhere in the 0xd0000 to
	0xe0000 range, which is where my ethernet card's RAM is mapped to
	[yes, it's got a 64K RAM buffer]

	2. Could someone re-explain to me the reasons why each 128K range can
	only have 8 bit ROMs or 16 bit ROMs?? [This is I assume, what is causing
	the problems]

	3. How was this problem solved for the WD 8013 in a similar situation??


						Many thanks,
							Rafal