Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems?

Vojtech Pavlik
2002-01-04T19:45:33Z

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:36:06PM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Vojtech Pavlik wrote:
>
> > And of course, there will be a huge amount of false positives, because
> > all the new chipsets have an ISA bridge built into the southbridge chip
> > and it is there even when no ISA slots are present.
>
> A false positive is less painful than a false negative. Then if a system
> has a PCI-ISA bridge, it's surely for purpose there (otherwise what is the
> justification for the additional cost of unused silicon?). Maybe for an
> on-board ISA serial or parallel port or an ISA floppy controller...

Because it's much cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf southbridge, even if
you're not going to use the ISA bus for any devices if you're making an
ISA-less mainboard, than trying to find or even design one without an
ISA bridge in it.

I recall people using the vt82c686a's with StrongARM CPUs even ...

--
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs