Legacy Terminology RE: DMA across PCI

[Lame Brooks-G14738 <brooks.lame@motorola.com>]

Yeah, years ago when I was a newbie to PCI, I got smacked on the head for
using DMA in reference to PCI.  DMA is an ISA bus related acronym that
stands for Direct Memory Access.  PCI is by definition all about direct
memory access - that's one of the features that made it superior to ISA!
Therefore, the old term DMA itself has little meaning in reference to PCI.
I think most of the people who try to use it now days are meaning a concept
analgous to the legacy ISA DMA Transfer Engine which is simply a state
machine that can manage a block data transfer given the start and end
addresses.  I'd stay away from legacy terminology when talking about
specific bus behaviour like burst transfers.   -- BrooksL

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel DeConinck [mailto:daniel.deconinck@sympatico.ca]
Sent: Saturday, 14 October, 2000 09:48
To: pci-sig@znyx.com
Subject: DMA across PCI


Hello,
 
I looked in the index of the PCI spec 2.1 and the index of "PCI System
Architecture", by Mindshare, Inc. Niether had a reference to DMA.
 
I am guessing that there is no such thing as DMA in the PCI world. Is that
the case ?
 
I further guess that the closest thing to DMA is a Master read or a Master
write cylce.
 
Please enlighten me.
 
Sincerely
Daniel DeConinck
High Res Technologies, Inc.