Re: lift the ioport_resource limit ...

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>]

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 11:11:53AM -0700, Jun Sun wrote:

> I would not normally assign IO space above 0xffff either.  But recently I
> found multiple PCI buses, especially dual PCI buses, are getting popular, as
> examplified by two Gallelio chips and the new NEC Vrc5477 chips.  
> 
> Since all drivers share the same mips_io_port_base, - even though the devices
> may be on different PCI buses - we need to assign the PCI IO windows
> contiguously so that drivers can share the same base address.  In most such
> setups, you will get more than 0xffff IO ranges.

After some discussion with some of the Linux PCI guys I think we should try
to avoid extend the per-bus I/O address space beyond 64k ports.  This is not
a very strong ``should avoid'', though.  The primary concern is a number of
broken peripheral chips which apparently are floating around out there in
good numbers.

Another reason to not extend the PCI-bus address range to 4g ports is the
size of the available physical address space in the main processor's
address space itself.  Limited by the 32-bit address space we can only
address a limited number via in/out anyway, so we better shouldn't fake
what we ain't got (cited freely after Seymoure Cray), so 4g ports is silly
anyway.

  Ralf