Re: Solaris developer wants a Linux Mentor for drivers.

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 01:21:09PM -0500, Alan Kilian wrote:
> Forwarded message:
> > From: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
> > 
> > Why not 2.6?  No new Linux distros are shipping 2.4 kernels anymore...
> 
>   Well, I down loaded and installed RedHat-9 5 weeks ago, and it
>   is a 2.4 kernel, so I thought that would be fine.
>   (See what a novice I am?)

Heh, Red Hat 9 is quite old now (a few years old I think.)  Try the
latest Red Hat Fedora Core 2 for a more up to date distro if you like to
use Red Hat.

> > And a PCI bus driver?  
> > What kind of hardware is this?  
> > Is this a driver for a pci card, or a pci bus controller?
> 
>   This is a driver for talking to my hardware which is a PCI bus card.

So, it's a card, not a PCI bus controller, right?  That's much simpler.

>   This card has 5 large FPGAs, SRAM and dram on it which is used to
>   accelerate bioinformatics search algorithms.
> 
>   The card works under Sun Solaris and Windows/2000, and of course,
>   we would like to add Linux to the list.
> 
>   Eventually, I'll need to support DMA to and from the card, but
>   I can get by for a while just doing single-dword I/O.
> 
>   I just hacked in dev->bus->ops->read_dword(dev,1,&retval);
>   and I can read memory on the card! (Well, things don't crash anyway)

What's wrong with using readl() instead?  Use pci_read_config_dword() if
you want access to the config space.

>   If this is absolutely the wrong way to do this, please let me know!
> 
>   Note: I have no idea what the second parameter to read_dword() is!

Try getting a copy of the Linux Device Drivers book (it's also online if
you don't want to buy it) and taking a look at the pci chapter.  It
should help you out.

Do you have a pointer to your Linux driver that we might be able to help
you out with?

Good luck,

greg k-h