Software Installation
rev 2.0
SFPCI -VME SERIES User’s Guide and Installation Manual
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numerous “sparse” mappings are made, the user should not be aware that mapping
windows are being used.
The PVME device assigns the PCI physical addresses for accessing VMEbus address
space by using hardware base and bound registers. These base and bound registers
permit us to define space on the PCI bus for our use that did not show up when our
device was initialized by the Sun Open Boot PROM.
There is a problem here associated with the Sun Open Boot PROM configuration of PCI
devices. As far as the Sun Open Boot PROM can tell when it reads and configures the
devices on its PCI bus, the PVME device appears to occupy only 4KBytes or 64KBytes
of space (depending on the version) in PCI memory space.
Enabling a PVME slave image window onto the VMEbus makes this assumption
erroneous. After initialization and use, the PVME device, in essence, becomes “bigger”
than it was at OBP initialization time.
There is no way to tell the Open Boot PROM about this changed condition.
In theory, this seems bad--if devices are “hot plugged” into the PCI bus, the Sun Open
Boot PROM could assign some other device the space that we have allocated for the use
of our slave image windows. In practice, this is not a problem, since PCI hot plugging is
not at this time supported on Sun machines smaller than the Enterprise class.
Because of this consideration, if you have a PCI device that co-habits a PCI space with
the PVME device, it is SAFER to install your PCI device BEFORE the PVME device.
If you don’t do this, your PCI device may not be able to be installed.
Generally, you probably want to put the PVME device into the least-occupied PCI space
that will support it electrically. Sun configures all their onboard devices, plus supporting
eeprom, in the 32-bit PCI space. On the older UltraSPARC I and II based machines, this
occupies approximately the lowest megabyte of PCI address space in this slot, as well as
the highest 0x10000000 bytes of the PCI space. The PCI addresses used are somewhat
different on the UltraSPARC IIi based machines, such as the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10.
The space needs of standard Sun devices are not enough to force you to move the
PVME device to a different PCI space (usually).
5.6
pvme.conf
- PVME Configuration File Options
The PVME configuration file, pvme.conf, contains a number of optional settings that
control the behavior and performance of the PVME VME-to-PCI bridge.
5.6.1 interrupt-priorities
Syntax:
interrupt-priorities=N;
