Re: I20 to cause problems for linux et al. (fwd)

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Wed, 17 Sep 1997 19:23:47 +0100 (BST)

> from a Memory/IO/Bus-like interface as we have with most todays cards to a
> Command/Message oriented interface. This means, that drivers can be split
> quite like Linux does for SCSI into a hardware-dependent level (for the host-
> adaptor) and a hardware-independent level for handling the protocols.

Latency latency latency. And its interesting to note that while NT5.0 will
ship with I2O even MS sounded dubious about aspects of it. Another hint at
how big a problem they have is when you look in the spec[1] at the network
layer and they have tons of packet batching parameters to avoid lots of
events

> However AFAIK the only working I2O chipset available yet is from Intel and
> designed as a (PCI ?-)bridge, i.e. commands will probably go CPU->PCI->I2O.
> But this will probably get a direct one sometime.

It's all in the spec a draft of which I2O kindly left for anon ftp for a while