AROS Status Update

[mschulz]

"Why would you want to invent a new incompatible pci.library and later do a wrapper?
Why don't simply make a new library with functions compatible with OpenPCI ones and avoid the need of using a wrapper?"

I wanted to write OpenPCI compatible thing at the beginning. Unfortunatelly the OpenPCI was insufficient for me. To few features, to limited API. Additionally I've found some licence issues (at least in the version I had) - Aros core libs cannot be GPL'ed. Finally, I wanted to have a system which supports more than one PCI bus in one system (man PCI bus and eg. PCI bus over any PCI device). Using OpenPCI would mean we would need separate openpci.library for every single architecture. The PCI classes are hardware independant and the HW driver class needs in simpliest case to overload two methods to get things working.

"Titan will probably end up making free the stuff that doesn't require signing NDAs..."

Yes, probably...

[mschulz]

"Yes, but the author of a GPL product can provide additional licenses, and Titan could give you an OpenPCI and make it AROS PL..."

Yes, but I didn't meany Titan here. The OpenPCI SDK he sent me has include file which is/was extremly based (I could almost say copy&paste) on one of linux kernel header files. So I should rather ask there

"Well, Prometheus library allows you to have various PCI buses... and it also allows you to have various pci devices inside the same PCI card."

Can I have there a PCI device on PCI bus which contains itself an other PCI bus (accessed only through this device) to which there is connected additional PCI card providing it's own PCI bus? Mine pci classes allow that

"Couldn't you use the BIOS for that?"

AROS doesn't use BIOS except loading stage (actually it's GRUB then who does the job).

"When I load an OS on a x86 machine doesn't it use the BIOS to know how to access the PCI bus?"

Doesn't have to. There is a standard way on x86 to talk to PCI bus.

"But please, talk with Titan, try to ask him a special OpenPCI version with the AROS licence I guess He'll cooperate"

We have already chatted few months ago. Then I've decided to write pci drivers myself.