Since the production line of 68K CPUs reached its end with the 68060
chip more recent VMEBus CPUs (i.e. Intel based or Power PC) are
available. In most cases the implementation of the VMEBus on Intel
based boards is done with a PCI to VMEbus bridge from Tundra
www.tundra.com. The
first version of this chip was called Universe the newer one
Universe II. This chip is not only a bridge but provides many
additional functions like interrupt handling, DMA transfers, FIFOs,
mailboxes, semaphores and many more.
Features
The actual release of this driver works with kernel versions 2.4.x and 2.6.x
and supports the following features:
Access to VMEBus with A32/A24/A16, D32/D16/D8 and BLT/MBLT
Access from VMEBus to PCI resources
Easy-to-use write and read functions for VMEBus addresses
A fast pointer-like access mode
DMA transfers (including linked-list-operation)
Interrupt handling for DMA, VME irqs and mailboxes
Reliability
We developed this software for our data acquisition system which
reads out a complete particle physics detector system in parallel. It
consists of seven VMIC VMEbus CPUs (VMIVME-7750) and is optimized
for shortest readout times and maximum data troughput. We installed
this system in summer 2002 and since autumn 2002 it runs very reliable
and without any problems concerning driver or interface (of course
this is no warranty that it will work on all other systems).
Future
Of course there are still some things which have to be done in
future. The actual version of this driver is not irq-save on SMP
system. Since this systems are not very common (but they exist,
i.e. VMIVME-7765 from VMIC) and I don't have one to test the code
this support is actually not included but will be investigated.
If you have a VME SMP system, feel free to contact me (see contact).
