Yenta

[Jean Tourrilhes]

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 03:21:16PM +0200, caronte cerbero wrote:
> Hi Jean
> 
> Sorry for sending you this email, but I have seen a discussion in the
> web (in 2003) talking about a problem using Yenta and a Ricoh cardbus.
> 
> As it seems that I have the same problem, I would like to ask you if
> you finally solved the problem.
> 
> Thanks for all
> 
> Miguel Ángel

	Well... I'll cc the Pcmcia mailing list for posterity...
	The Ricoh card I'm using is an add-on Pcmcia/Cardbus
controller PCI cards for dektops (not talking of Ricoh chipsets
integrated in laptops).
	Those cards are cheap. The issue is that they don't have a
BIOS or ACPI support, which means that making them work is
tricky.

	From my experience, there is 3 classes of machines :
	o PCs with real ISA slots (and PCI slots obviously) : those
PCs don't allocate an irq properly to the controller. I've got a patch
that force an irq on those cards for 2.4.X and 2.6.X, but it's unclean
and was rejected by Linus. After that, you usually need to go in the
BIOS to dedicate some iomem regions to ISA cards. Once done, the
in-kernel Pcmcia modules work for Cardbus cards and most Pcmcia cards,
and the out-of-kernel Pcmcia modules work for all Pcmcia cards.
	o Old PCs with only PCI slots : those PCs don't allocate an
irq properly to the controller and can't allocate iomem regions to
it. The first issue can be worked-around with the first patch. I have
not managed to fixed the second one, and the BIOS has obviously no
support for ISA options. Result is that Pcmcia cards are not even
recognised (can't read CIS). I have not tried Cardbus cards.
	o Newer PCs with only PCI slots : those PCs allocate an IRQ
properly to the controller, and allocate iomem regions to it only if
the Pcmcia card is in the slot at boot time. Re-insertion of the
Pcmcia card seems to fail as well. If I remember, Cardbus cards work
better.

	Note that lately there was some e-mail on the Pcmcia mailing
list from Dominik about iomem allocation workarounds. I have not tried
those :
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-pcmcia/2005-May/001899.html

	Hope it helps...

	Jean