The issue of time is a good one. It's well known that once some basic
information is available then driver support can be implemented in Linux
faster than in any other OS. MS might take 18 months to write I2O support
that works, if it takes 12 months before Linux developers get hold of some
specs then that still leaves 6 months to do the coding if they aim to beat
MS...
>DPT is actually one of the few companies that is already sending hardware
>with I2O support to developers. I2O is still under development and so is
>the OS on the controllers (at least that was the state a few months ago).
This is interesting. How fast is the I2O controller? Would it be
possible to do some useful things on the i960 other than controlling
hardware? From memory the i960 supports time-slicing in the middle of
instructions so that a long instruction such as the floating point modulo
operation (which may take up to 75,000 clock cycles to complete) can
complete even in the presense of rapid interrupt activity. This should
allow a system to run a RT Linux kernel on the i960 which would do fun
things like plotting the Mandelbrot set at background priority while
controlling IO.
Has anyone ever done things like this before on Linux? The Haupphage
motherboards with i960 and 486 CPUs have been out for years...
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