Re: Looking for a card for Diagnostics

["Ed in Calif" <edincalif@attbi.com>]

Martijn,

That's a good idea, thanks.

When we evaluate motherboards we want to put maximum stress on the PCI
busses
to make sure they will standup during rigorous use.

So we typically fill the slots up with NIC and SCSI cards and run r/w tests
to connected
devices. But then we realized to do this type of testing the peripherals are
not really necessary,
they may even be slowing down the maximum data rate the card can do.  If we
could figure out
how to instruct the card to fill and empty it's on board buffer to and from
memory we would
get very high levels of traffic with out needing disks connected.

So that's our goal and reasoning.

We also use the vmetro, it's a great tool. But at  ~15K each we obviously
don't want to go
out and buy 16 if them to fillup all the slots some server boards have.
I think a cheap PCI card that can put maximum traffic onto a PCI bus just by
doing master
mode transfers would be a good product for some test equipmment vendor to
offer.
I know we's be buying them.

Regards,

Ed

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martijn Emons" <martijn.emons@arcobel.nl>
To: <edincalif@attbi.com>
Cc: <pci-sig@znyx.com>
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 1:42 AM
Subject: Re: Looking for a card for Diagnostics


> Hi Ed,
>
>
> Sounds like a peculiar 'diagnostics' you are trying to implement, here?
>
> Anyway, you take take any main-stream ($40) PCI card that is supporting
> OHCI.
> Every USB, firewire card supports OHCI nowadays, using this interface
> you can setup PCI-master read/write.
> The HW-specs (ie. register) you will find on the intel-web somewhere.
>
> Using normal USB-API and/or firewire-API on the OS that you are using
> (Microsoft) you will be able to let the card but some data
> into main memory.
>
> Note, that the API abstracts all low-level calls, to start/stop all
> memory-accesses, ie. you are not able to
> program those yourself. Why? Well, first of all, it's written as part of
> the kernel-mode driver, not a normal
> environment for a Windows-programmer to make use of. Second and main
> reason:
> all SW is written to hook-up the card to the applications that want to
> use the PC-IO that the card is targetted at.
> So using USB you only want to be able to 'move block of data from USB
> device #1 to main-memory location X'. etc.
>
> If you are looking for PCI-diagnostics tools, take a look at Vmetro etc.
> The SW allows for programming the (OHCI-) PCI-card
> to perform DMA (outside of MS-windows) using 'simpe' scripting-language.
> The added-value is:
> * bypassing MS-Windows stuff.
> * whilst analysing the behaviour of the card on the PCI-bus down to
> every PCI-cycle.
>
> We have used Vmetro-tooling to debug a PCI-interface of  a DSP-board we
> made:
> it appeared to be invaluable!
>
> --
>
> Kind regards, Martijn Emons
>
> - Designer Consultant -
> Arcobel ASIC Design Centre B.V.
> Hambakenwetering 1
> 5231 DD 's-Hertogenbosch,
> The Netherlands.
> tel.:  +31 73 64 60 100
> fax :  +31 73 64 60 115
>
>
>
>
>
> edincalif@attbi.com wrote:
>
> >We want to buy some PCI cards we can program to do read and writes to =
> >main memory.
> >We have not been able to find a card that provides this information.
> >
> >Does anyone know of a card that will provide us with the information on =
> >how to program
> >it to do mastermode reads and writes?
> >
> >thanks, Ed
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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