Re: ISA

[Jun Sun <jsun@mvista.com>]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 01:44:52PM -0500, Jim Paris wrote:
> > Interesting - I'd not considered that. Is ISA and non ISA space seperate on
> > MIPS or is it all rather ambiguous ?
> 
> On my particular machine, system RAM is at 0x00000000, and ISA I/O
> memory is at 0x10000000.  The driver I'm currently trying to work with
> calls check_mem_region with ISA addresses, which of course breaks when
> ISA memory isn't at zero.  One suggestion was to patch the driver to
> use something like
> 
>     check_mem_region(virt_to_phys(ioremap(ISA_address)), ...)
> 
> which might be the best way for now? 

I agree with Geert and think isa_xxx_mem_region is a better approach.
Unfortunately, this requires a change in both dirver and
arch-specific part.

> I think a more generic way to
> abstract away a bus (and support multiple types and numbers of I/O
> busses) is really necessary though.  Some way to register a bus with
> the kernel, and bind particular busses to particular instances of
> drivers, or something.
>

I have talked with somebody before about the address apace idea, which
is rather similar to what you are talking :

1. each address space has an id.
2. kernel pre-defines a couple of well-known ones, 0 for CPU physical, 
   1 for virtual, etc.
3. When drivers discover the devices, they get the address and also
   the address space id where the address resides.
4. there are a set of macro's that converts/maps an address or an
   address region from one space to another.

This generalized form allows multiple-PCI buses to use substractive decoding.
Also removes the 1:1 mapping requirement between PCI memory space and
CPU physical address space.

However, the detailed implementation can be hairy, which is why it 
is still an idea. :-)

Jun