15 Jan
2014
15 Jan
'14
6:13 p.m.
On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, David Riley wrote:
On Jan 15, 2014, at 7:10 AM, Steven Hirsch
<snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
However, a dual-proc G5 does not have PCI-e. I know this as I am currently
typing on one. ;)
On Tue, 14 Jan 2014, David Schmidt wrote:
Current Macs are all PCI Express. Machines up to early G5s have PCI slots (PCI-X is
directly compatible with PCI, though the card must be keyed for and compatible with 3.3v
signaling; typically on a standard PCI card, this would mean two keying notches since very
few PCI cards were produced for 3.3v only). Multicore G5s have PCI Express, which
won't do. Pictures I see online of the Catweasel Mk4 show dual keying notches, which
indicates that it SHOULD work fine in PCI-X slots. There are Thunderbolt-to-PCI
conversion boxes, but my understanding is that they require some driver support (i.e.,
they don't work out of the box with the original PCI drivers without modification).
On the Catweasel front, I have been working to
consolidate the various stand-alone disk interpreters, including Karsten Scheibler's
cwtool code, combining them with a project that is a Catweasel driver for OSX:
http://sourceforge.net/p/catweasel-osx/wiki/Home/
If anyone knows of other CW interpreters not on
my list, please get in touch here or on SourceForge.
Do current Macs still have PCI slots? Would the code from your project work on an
ancient G4 with backlevel OSX (that's the only Mac I have with PCI)? Driver-wise, I would hope that it works well under
10.4, at least; that's the latest OS I ever feel comfortable with on PPC Macs, because
10.5 was such a dog even on G5s. The site doesn't say, but the kernel PCI interfaces
didn't change a whole lot between 10.2 and 10.5, to my recollection. Those neurons
are a bit dusty, though.
Ehhh. I'd certainly say 10.4 is a lot faster on a G5...but I'm running
10.5 for the software compat. It runs well enough for me to use it as a
day-to-day workstation.
- Dave
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects