Subject: PowerROMmed cards

From: Matthew Wilcox <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 23:18:23 +0100 (BST)

This is the suggestion which was put to me:

Each driver which supports a card that can be fitted with a PowerROM should
check through the modules which are present on the card.  It should look
for modules of the form `*TX'.  This is the only difference between the
ROMs.  Apparently it would be prohibitively expensive to change the product
ID for each style of card.

Here are the cards that have PowerROMs currently available.
Acorn AKA30,31,32; Cumana 8 & 16bit; Lindis (all); VTi (16bit, +floppy,
+user, 8bit); Oak (all); Morley; Castle (not Storm)
They don't support Cumana 32, Connect32 or Technomatic.

Here are the thoughts which occur to me:
1. Aargh.
2. How easy is it to read the chunk directory from the podule?  I did it
   in a program called PodHacker once; I'll have to dig it out and see how
   to do it.  If I used RISC OS SWIs and it can't be (easily|at all) done
   under Linux then see suggestion 4.
3. If this code goes into each SCSI module, it's going to be awfully big.
   Have a compile time `PowerROM support' option which compiles into the
   main kernel.  This should provide a function which you can call, given
   a podule number, will attempt to extract the first *TX module name
   and return the name.  The driver can then contain very little extra
   code.
4. Put the detection code into the booter.  While keeping Linux auto-
   detecting is a wonderful idea in theory, if the rules have been broken
   for the benefit of RISC OS, then I don't see why we shouldn't fix the
   problem in RISC OS.  The booter should be able to pass parameters to
   the kernel; I know it can for ether cards though I'm not quite sure how
   it would work for scsi cards.

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From: "Neil A. Carson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 May 1990 00:35:19 +0100

Matthew Wilcox wrote:

	...

There is some interesting news on this PowerTec stuff now. I'll send a
mail to Matthew about it, work out what's known, and then post a
summary.

	N.