Hands on PCI interface ...

The southbridge or PCI-ISA bridge chip can only exist with "side-band" channels to the main chipset. There is only one of these possible, and then only if the rest of the chipset supports the southbridge concept. The side-band channels do not exist as signals on the PCI bus, so I don't believe that it would be possible to do a PCI board that provides full ISA -- more particularly, support for ISA DMA. You might be able to get by with some specialized FPGA or ASIC for the purposes of a reduced ISA feature set connecting to the PCI (no DMA and with subtractive decoding for the ISA address space.)

I haven't heard of such a thing, though.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan
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I've run across such things occasionally. Do a web search on '"PCI to ISA" + card' or some such. A quick search found these (rather expensive) external chassis PCI to ISA extenders and I've seen others (no idea how well any work):

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PCI->ISA Bridge kits:

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  Keith
Reply to
Keith Williams

No side-band channels/signals are needed.

Only one "subtractive decoder" is possible. Southbridges use "subtractive decoding", so only one southbridge is possible.

Perhaps, but only because the DMA controller's addresses are already used by the southbridge. ISA busmaster is also a likely "issue".

with

The PLX 9052 is a PCI to ISA bridge. IIRC it's only a PCI target device though.

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  Keith
Reply to
Keith Williams

I think it is possible if the ISA card can use 1 interrupt or share interrupts. You'll need some intelligence to convert ISA DMA to PCI bus mastering (which is more or less the same, only the addresses are generated at a different spot). The amount of I/O and memory addresses can be preset on the PCI card so substractive addressing isn't needed.

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Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

channels

Why do you say this? It's certainly been true for as long as I've worked on these chipsets. That does date back to the P2, but have things changed? I doubt it.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

The problem isn't that, it's the timing requirements of ISA DMA. They simply cannot be met by the PCI bus using normal PCI transactions. This is part of why the sideband signals are required to the main chipset, so that the chipset can be informed about the non-standard nature of certain transactions. Without them, the DMA timing itself cannot be supported on the PCI.

I suppose that's possible, of course. Usually, ISA bus transactions are handled as subtractive decoding, though.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

channels

No sideband signals are in the PCI spec (they wouldn't be "sideband" ;-). Certainly the southbridge and subtractive decoding are covered.

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  Keith
Reply to
Keith Williams

How about this?

A modern PC motherboard with ISA slots? I am looking for the fastest processor speed available.

Rich

Reply to
aiiadict

I'm convinced it can be done with a trick: have the PCI-ISA bridge read data from the ISA card first, store this and then send it to the main memory. This way you separate the timing between the ISA and PCI bus. This also allows for a smarter scheme in which more data is buffered in the PCI bridge before it is send to the main memory. You'll need to have the PCI bridge generate the addresses anyway. Needless to say, you'll need to change the ISA driver software into a PCI version as well.

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Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

How about this?

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Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

Hi,

I was asked to look for ISA MB with decent speed by a co-worker. I had assumed he did a google search and came up with nothing.

Thanks for the tip, and I will always second-guess co-workers in the future!

Rich

Reply to
aiiadict

channels

I was involved in chipset testing. One of the prominent examples where ISA transactions simply cannot be translated to properly formed PCI transactions is in the case of ISA DMA. There is no correct mapping possible -- the timing requirements on the ISA side are "hard" and the PCI bus doesn't have the needed transaction types to fully support ISA-side DMA without the sideband. So the Intel chipsets all (up to the point where I stopped working with them directly, anyway) included pins which were simply called "sideband." These pins couple the southbridge with the main chipset in order to inform it about things like ISA DMA, which have to be handled through PCI transactions but where the timing requirements are hard and the chipset needs to support them. This was necessary as PCI transactions had to be "twisted" a bit to make this work.

This is what I mean by sideband -- these out-of-band communications between the southbridge and the main chipset for support of things like ISA DMA timing.

It was these sideband channels that accounted for about 1/2 of all chipset bugs, so I know these sidebands exist. Plus, of course, I had to read the data sheets and understand things like the inbound and outbound queuing, read around writes, and a host of things regarding testing the chipsets with FPGA boards on both sides of the southbridge, trying to break it.

Like I said, things may have changed. It's possible that I'd barely recognize the PCI, today (though I doubt things have changed that much.) But I don't yet see how ISA DMA timing, for one example, can be maintained exclusively through standard PCI transactions and without any "extra communication" to the chipset.

I'm not saying that a reduced ISA wouldn't work -- it would. But there are a few bits of non-overlapping semantics between ISA and PCI. And these are usually handled by the sideband channel. I can assure you that if Intel could have gotten rid of it, they would have clawed and screamed to do so. It was a sink of engineering labor they would have been glad to be rid of.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

The problem is a direct result of ordering rules. PCI (and basically all IO buses) rely on certain ordering rules. Specific rules that apply in this case are:

strong write ordering

- posted writes must arrive in order

- reads must flush writes (a read request must push posted writes ahead of it (towards the target being read), and read completion (i.e. the read data) must push posted writes ahead of it (toward the requestor of the read data)

deadlock avoidance

- writes must be able to pass requests (for example, read requests)

PCI has a retry mechanism for transactions and ISA does not. Once an ISA device initiates a transaction there is no mechanism to get the master to realease the bus until the transaction completes. The master can be held it wait states, but you can't tell it to retry.

So, take the following scenario...

- the host has a posted write transaction heading towards the ISA bus (i.e. it is temporarily stored in the chipset because the PCI bus was busy)

- the ISA bus is granted to a bus mastering device and the device intiates a read of host memory

Without sideband signals, you have a deadlock condition. The read data being returned the ISA bus master cannot be returned to the ISA bus before the posted write that were buffered in the chipset. But, the posted write cannot be delivered to the ISA bus because it is busy (the master is being held in wait states waiting for the read data to be returned).

The sideband signals are used to make sure that the posted write buffers in the chipset are flushed (empty) before an ISA bus master is granted the bus.

So, if you are implementing an ISA target device this isn't a problem (you don't have an ISA bus master device).

These "sideband" signals are not documented in the PCI specifications. They are chipset implementation specific signals and are private to the motherboard.

TC

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Reply to
TC

Search for "passive backplane" in which case the CPU plug in card contains most of the functionality these days.

Also some ITX size motherboards have PC/104 connectors, so I would not be too surprised, if some even contained an ISA connector instead. Paul

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

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