Hi, i am implementing a PCI card using a FPGA. I am performing my tests on an old Pentium III computer that is basically fully based on the PCI bus. The OS is Linux. It is all working fine incluiding mastering but something weird happened today. I made a mistake at my FPGA code and at some point the FPGA started to burst write to to the computer and never stoped. I was controlling the computer using a notebook using SSH and when that problem happened the computer just hanged, i could not do anything. So my question is, when i master a PCI bus, does the CPU get involved at any point on this transaction. The computer could get hanged becouse i was using the whole PCI bandwidth, but as there is the bus arbiter, it was suposed to work... I guess the same happen with the memory access... So any idea why that happened? As far as i understand the CPU does not perform instruction related to the PCI bus when i am mastering it right?
Thank you!