IOASIC(4) | Device Drivers Manual | IOASIC(4) |
ioasic
— baseboard
IO control ASIC for DEC TURBOchannel systems
ioasic0 at tc? slot ? offset ?
The ioasic
driver provides support for the
DEC proprietary IOCTL ASIC found on all DEC TURBOchannel machines with MIPS
(DECstation 5000 series, excluding the 5000/200) and Alpha (3000-series)
processors. On these machines (including the 5000/200), all baseboard
devices should be configured as children of the
ioasic
device.
The ioasic
provides hardware DMA channels
and interrupt support for several baseboard devices, including one
asc
SCSI device with a scatter/gather DMA channel,
an mc146818-compatible mcclock
, an Am7930 audio
device bba
, one or two zs
two-port serial devices, and a AMD 7990 LANCE le
Ethernet interface.
The ioasic
is also used for the
floppy-disc drive and audio/ISDN hardware on the Personal DECstation and
audio-equipped TURBOchannel Alphas, where the ioasic
hardware provides a scatter-gather DMA channel between the 16-bit device and
the 32-bit tc
DMA address space.
Support for scatter-gather DMA eliminates the need for additional
copying. A baseboard asc
SCSI adaptor attached to an
ioasic
will give slightly better performance than
its tc
counterpart.
The ioasic
driver first appeared in
NetBSD 1.1, derived from DECstation boot-time
configuration code in 4.4BSD.
The DECstation 5000/200 does not actually have an IOASIC chip, but for consistency it must be configured as if it did.
September 12, 2007 | NetBSD 10.99 |