[OpenIndiana-discuss] ISA card support in OI

[Andrew Gabriel]

On 11/04/2017 05:41, STEVENS Nigel wrote:
> [@@ THALES GROUP INTERNAL @@]
> Hi,
>
> Does OI support using ISA cards?
> I have a project porting a legacy system from Solaris 2.6 onto a new h/w platform and OI_151a7 (but willing to use any version) and cannot get a critical ISA card working. The card is bespoke to the project and cannot be changed. The new hardware is a PCI SBC hosted on a mixed PCI/ISA backplane.
> I've seen online blogs saying that ISA support was removed from Solaris 8 onwards so worries me that OI doesn't  support it.

x86 PC's still have a number of built-in peripherals which are on the 
ISA bus
(serial ports, printer port, and sometimes PS/2 keyboard/mice ports) which
are still supported, so generic ISA bus support is still there. 
(Internally, it's
implemented as the LPC - Low Pin Count - bus in motherboards, but that's
transparent to software.)

Solaris removed support for ISA bus cards by removing the drivers for the
individual cards, but I believe the generic ISA bus support is all still 
there,
and some people just copied the removed drivers back from the previous
release and they worked just fine. Sun still had customers running
industrial process control from their own ISA cards after this, and that 
still
had to work.

One other thing that went was support for ISA plug'n'play (auto 
configuration).
That was only in the DCA (Device Configuration Assistant), which was 
replaced
in Solaris 10 U1 if I recall correctly with newboot, and we didn't 
implement any
in-kernel replacement for the DCA's ISA plug'n'play support. This probably
means you would have to explicitly configure any ISA bus card in the 
driver's
.conf file, as it won't be automatically discovered from the system's ACPI
tables unless it's an integrated peripheral on the motherboard.

Having said that, I don't have any system with ISA bus which has anywhere
near enough memory to boot any current Solaris/Illumos software, so I can't
test it.

-- 
Andrew Gabriel