We will be utilising a cPCI data acquisition card with a QNX 4.25 based
embedded data acuisition and control unit. We require to provide a hot swap
feature (cPCI cards) for the application. For other projects, we have
developed (software polling and interrupt) drivers for cPCI cards using
Watcom C for QNX 4.25, but never used hot swap feature of cPCI.
Can hot-swap feature be utilised with QNX 4.25? What will be the difference
in developing a driver without hot-swap feature and the one with hot-swap
feature?
At the time of purchasing the card, do we need to explicitly check support
for QNX 4.25 RTOS? Can anyone suggest a make of cPCI boards which is most
suited for use with QNX?
You will need to have some type of PCI aware application that knows what
devices reside on what boards, so that when a board is removed/inserted,
the PCI application can free or allocate resources to the cPCI card.
Some cPCI cards have bridge chips on them with devices below the bridge
chip. On initial power-on, the BIOS should setup these devices, but when
one is hot-swapped, some application will have to do the work that the
BIOS does at startup.
As long as the BIOS supports all the _CA_PCI… calls, you shouldn’t have
a problem, but you will need to know whether there are device drivers for
the devices on the boards.
Previously, Krupa wrote in qdn.public.qnx4:
Hi,
We will be utilising a cPCI data acquisition card with a QNX 4.25 based
embedded data acuisition and control unit. We require to provide a hot swap
feature (cPCI cards) for the application. For other projects, we have
developed (software polling and interrupt) drivers for cPCI cards using
Watcom C for QNX 4.25, but never used hot swap feature of cPCI.
Can hot-swap feature be utilised with QNX 4.25? What will be the difference
in developing a driver without hot-swap feature and the one with hot-swap
feature?
You will need some type of hot swap application that knows what driver(s) are
associated with what board. This application will have to slay these driver(s)
before the card is removed and re-start them when another card is inserted.
At the time of purchasing the card, do we need to explicitly check support
for QNX 4.25 RTOS? Can anyone suggest a make of cPCI boards which is most
suited for use with QNX?
As I said before, if there are QNX device drivers for the devices on the
board, you shouldn’t have a problem. The only problem that you might have
is setting up the PCI bridge chips (if any) on the boards.