From: Fred Kleinsorge [kleinsorge@star.zko.dec.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 11:36 AM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Re: installing pci cards on ds10


Earl Lakia wrote in message <3ACB3533.5E909634@ipact.com>...
>
>
>The POST (Power On and Self Test) code probes the PCI
>bus and this information is then made available to OpenVMS after
>bootstrap.  There are modules ICBMs that help driver
>determine if their card is present on the bus (PCI
>standard has a set of configuration registers and one
>of the registers identifies the vendor and the product).
>Most third party suppliers I've come across (including myself)
>use a privileged program that browses the above mentioned
>tables and then loads the driver using sysman.
>
>Therefore, I suspect that even if a driver is not supported
>by Compaq, they will provide some way to load it.  You
>should most likely install the card first and then try to
>load the driver for the card.  I would try myself and then
>think of buying the support if I couldn't get it working.
>


Alpha Only:

The most primitive way of configuring a device (other than using the CONNECT
command in SYSMAN) is to write an ICBM.  These configuration modules (which
execute in executive mode, and are difficult to write) can do pretty much
anything the system does for configuration.  On V7.1 and beyond, a simpler
method (file based autoconfiguration) was implemented that is used by all
VMS supplied drivers that eliminates the need for most ICBMs, and the need
to edit the bus support code for VMS-supplied drivers.  In file based
autoconfiguration, a file names SYS$CONFIG.DAT (and a user file -
SYS$USER_CONFIG.DAT) contain ASCII text records that supply all the
information necessary to identify and load a device driver.  In fact,
non-VMS-supplied disk drivers can be supplied as BOOT devices without O/S
modification using this method.  IntraServer for instance provided support
this way for their Symbios SCSI driver (and used an extension of this called
3rd party boot support to even boot the device for an initial VMS
installation).

Users can add their own devices into SYS$USER_CONFIG.DAT file, and even
supercede a VMS driver for the same device.  All of this is documented in
the new feautures manual, and I believe will eventually be in the next
generation of the Driver book from Margie Sherlock.

BTW - VMS probes the PCI bus itself, and builds the bus configuration
records.  The firmware allocates PCI address space for the devices, and
initializes them.