Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 23:41:07 -0500 (EST) From: zhihuizhang <bf20761@binghamton.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: onboard IDE controller, installation, and driver Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.L3.93.990321231807.21647A-100000@bingsun2>
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I have a PC that has ASUS SP97-V motherboard. It has onboard IDE and FDC. I have three confusions arising from this motherboard: (1) I am wondering whether those "onboard" or "integrated" controllers are connected to the PCI bus of the motherboard. Or are they connected to the CPU local bus, as described in the book "PCI system architecture" by Tom Shanley (see page 21)? Or are they connected to the X-bus described by the same book? BTW, is the integrated floppy controller a IDE controller? The word "onboard" really confuses me. (2) If the hard disk is connected to the IDE controller which is sitting on the PCI bus (the manual says it is a PCI Bus master), then when I install FreeBSD, I should be able to remove ALL ISA storage devices. Right? Yet, I remember doing this and FreeBSD installation refuses to go on because there is no storage device configured (I am not absolutely sure about this though. I did the installation about a month ago). Why is this the case? A PCI device should be configured automatically. (3) If I write a device driver for a hard disk, I will read/write I/O registers on the disk drive (not in the controller). Does this mean that the IDE controller plays no role in the drive code? I mean, the driver code can ignore the existence of the controller, as if it directly controls the disk drive. Do we need any special handling of the IDE or SCSI controller in the driver code? I hope some one can clarify my concepts or give me some pointers. Any help is appreciated. -------------------------------------------------- | Zhihui Zhang, http://cs.binghamton.edu/~zzhang | | Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY at Binghamton | -------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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