[GRLUG] PCI VGA Help

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 07:54 -0500, L. V. Lammert wrote:
>> On Wed, 20 Apr 2011, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 11:44 -0500, L. V. Lammert wrote:
>> > > Need someone with knowledge of hw - we have a passive backplane system
>> > > with ISA & PCI where we need a 2nd monitor (Ubuntu 10.04)
>> > Can you be more precise about "have a passive backplane system"?
>> In what way? 10 ISA + 6 PCI? Two slots are ISA/PCI for the CPU and a
>> spare.
>
> Is this some type of vertical appliance or a backplane extension to a
> "PC".  How does the backplane attach to the mainboard [simple PCI ribbon
> cable to the planar?  Or does the host motherboard have provisions for
> the attachment of the backplane?].

If it's the kind of system I had as a desktop box for several years,
here's how it would be laid out:

* You have a CPU card which has northbridge, southbridge, CPU, I/O,
etc on it. Will have headers for serial, USB, etc. May have onboard
network and video, but all of this on the CPU card.
* You have a "motherboard" in a 4U case which has three PCI-PCI
bridges on it and possibly some routing logic for a keyboard
connector.

The backplane will have several PCI slots in it. The "ISA" slot is
actually a CPU-board-only connection using an ISA edge connector
socket, and how the CPU board accesses what little services the
backplane offers. (My system offered a fan header, something for
chassis intrusion detection, and I think some kind of sysadmin bus
like smbus, but I don't recall exactly)

In my system, I was able to run PCI 2.1 devices, at least. I may have
been able to run PCI 2.2, but I don't know for certain. (And, of
course, he may not be running the same exact hardware)

>
> You have [probably] at least three PCI busses in this case. All all the
> PCI slots 'narrow' or do some/all of them have extensions [there are a
> duzzying number of PCI versions at this point].
>
> Again, what options related to the PCI bus appear in the host BIOS?  Is
> the current video card built-in or on the bus?  If on the bus is it on
> the backplane or in a slot on the host's motherboard?

-- 
:wq

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