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PCI phased out? (Announce)

posted by marcov, 10.02.2011, 21:10

> > Well, ISA is gone a long time too, and people complained as hard when
> the
> > DIN keyboard was exchanged for the PS/2. Or ISA by PCI.
>
> Yes. E.g. can you imagine there are special ISA/PCI adapters for industrial
> and medical devices, that cost more than whole PC?

Duh, same as the search by Nasa for 80(1)86's.

> When mobo fail and you
> have to buy new one you are missing the interface. You have to pay x-times
> more for overpriced special industrial mobo (btw it's nothing special,

No, since I did the smart thing and junked that kind of kit long ago. Sure, if it is your NMR, you might have no choice, but you are not very likely to run new software on your NMR.

> > Actually several modern boards have COM pinheaders on the mobo. They are
> > just not connected. The flat-cable with (9 or 25 pins) serial port can
> be
> > found easily and cheaply (but unfortunately if you order only one, the
> > shipping costs will be magnitudes larger than the price. We need at
> least
> > one COM per system, so we bought a bunch of them at low cost)
>
> Hm, I was looking on various core iX mobos and didn't saw such pin headers.
As said, our current Gigabyte P6* series mobo has. So new that it is buggy!

I can lookup exact type tomorrow, but it has the flawed *6* series chip, so might be hard to get (we ordered just before the recall)

> > I do miss PS/2 kbd and mouse though. While USB2 kbd/mouse works far
> better
> > on somewhat recent systems than when it on older systems(*) , the plug
> and
> > play nature can cause funky behaviour if other devices are plugged in on
> > the bus.
>
> USB KB/mouse support (and USB flashdisk) is done via BIOS emulation and
> there are some programs that crashes with it. E.g. Uniflash in some cases.
> So if it would be 100% transparent emulation I don't complain.
(It is the PNP nature, and the timeouts for busreset, rather than USB itself I suspect)

> > To be honest, I never really liked USB, and avoid it if I reasonably can
> > (e.g. I buy ESATA HDs, and firewire in the past). Basically I only use
> it
> > for printer and sticks.
>
> I also don't like it. BTW did you e.g. tried to connect 4 or more
> serial/usb convertor to USB hub and collect simultaneously sent data
> streams?

No. I never actually got serial/usb connectors to run reliably long term.

I use some for the admin ports of some of our hardware, and we use them with laptops for testing. But we always get real ports for production machines.

I would already be happy if they were just flawed and unreliable. I suspect several of them of messing with hibernation behaviour of said laptops.

Luckily PCI (or PCIex) versions of com cards are relatively cheap. (I actually bought 6 for Eur 15 together a while back)

> I also do alot with MCU and have a lot of gadgets to COM/LPT ports because
> this is simle interface that you can implement on MCU side and also control
> SW on PC consist of a few outportb() instead of handling USB evil...
Well, we use windows (and more rarely *nix) for production machines. But indeed, no USB there. Trust COM port cards all the way. Connect to Uc boards.

> Also ISA was good for this case. I can made simple ISA card at home with
> common parts from 74xx logic but I probably cannot do it for PCI (but still
> possible) and surely not for PCI-E.
Well, ISA was mostly out of production when I entered the workfloor in 2000.


> > I actually can't wait for that to happen. Kills the MBR and finally no
> > primary partition limit (and/or other special partition handling)
> anymore.
> > But that is from a *nix perspective.
>
> I didn't reach 2TB prolem so don't care yet.

I have hit the 3/4 primary partition limit often enough.

> BUT it's not about MBR, it's
> about BIOS services.

It's also partitionlabel layout.

> If there will not be BIOS you cannot boot DOS.

Couldn't care less. And while I have several XP/32 machines, I wouldn't install XP on new machines, so that is not a problem.

> Modern OS like MACOS

(I assume you mean OSX. if sb says MACOS I still think of classic macos, preferably on 68k)

> can use EFI for loading but who will rewrite DOS? This is
> what I call end of IBM PC compatible.

Thank god! :-)

> Well it is still x86 but completly without legacy support stuff.
About time!

> BTW any idea why VESA LFB access is so slow on that PC?
Nobody cares for accelerating it anymore. It is only used for GUIs during OS install, and after people go to native emulation. For that "compatibility" situation it doesn't have to be fast. The Linux fora are full of thread how to get rid of "generic vesa", and move to native ATI/NVIDIA/Intel drivers as quick as possible

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