[H-GEN] Linux file server

Robert Brockway robert at timetraveller.org
Sat Jul 3 17:00:39 EDT 2004


On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Russell Stuart wrote:

> PCI bus first.  But if you don't talk to your HDD's via
> a card (ie you only use the raw ATA/SATA connectors
> provided by your motherboard) you won't hit that

Devices on the motherboard (such as an ATA or SATA controller) still talk
to the rest of the system through a PCI bus, it is just imbedded on the
board.  Infact, for all except really high end boards it is the same PCI
bus that the cards use.  Checkout /proc/bus/pci - you'll find your
imbedded devices mentioned there.

AGP cards have their own bus of course since AGP is a variation of PCI.
One of the reasons that AGP video should be faster is that it is not
having to content with other data on a shared bus.

Older boards that used to have ISA slots _bridged_ the ISA bus onto the
PCI bus.  Many people thought these were different buses.

One other interesting point about the ISA bus is that 486 boxes often had
much faster ISA buses than later machines like Pentiums where the ISA bus
was considered legacy.  Offically an ISA bus is 8MHz but some 486 buses
were clocked at up to 20MHz while all the legacy ISA buses were pretty
much stock standard 8MHz, or so I am led to believe.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, rbrockway at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah




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