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EISA-Bus Locked Cycles

The EISA bus provides a locked cycle that allows users to read/write the contents of a device register or memory location as an atomic operation. This facility is normally implemented for semaphores' bit test-and-set operations.

On the Indigo2, the hardware implementation of a locked cycle is limited. Indigo2 allows an EISA card to issue a locked cycle, but only for the duration of two contiguous read/write operations. Access to this class of cycles is provided on the CPU side, much like the read/modify/write cycle on a VME bus, through the pio_rmw* kernel functions. See "Writing a Kernel-level EISA Device Driver."

In general, LOCK* is not considered to be a supported feature of the Silicon Graphics EISA implementation.


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