The ppc driver provides low level support to various parallel port chipsets for the ppbus(4) system.
During the probe phase, ppc detects parallel port chipsets and initializes private data according to
their operating mode: COMPATIBLE, NIBBLE, PS/2, EPP, ECP and other mixed modes. If a mode is provided at
startup through the flags variable of the boot interface, the operating mode of the chipset is forced
according to flags and the hardware supported modes.
During the attach phase, ppc allocates a ppbus structure, initializes it and calls the ppbus attach
function.
Supportedflags
bits 0-3: chipset forced mode(s)
PPB_COMPATIBLE 0x0 /* Centronics compatible mode */
PPB_NIBBLE 0x1 /* reverse 4 bit mode */
PPB_PS2 0x2 /* PS/2 byte mode */
PPB_EPP 0x4 /* EPP mode, 32 bit */
PPB_ECP 0x8 /* ECP mode */
And any mixed values.
bit 4: EPP protocol (0 EPP 1.9, 1 EPP 1.7)
bit 5: activate IRQ (1 IRQ disabled, 0 IRQ enabled)
bit 6: disable chipset specific detection
bit 7: disable FIFO detection
Supportedchipsets
Some parallel port chipsets are explicitly supported: detection and initialisation code has been written
according to their datasheets.
• SMC FDC37C665GT and FDC37C666GT chipsets
• Natsemi PC873xx-family (PC87332 and PC87306)
• Winbond W83877xx-family (W83877F and W83877AF)
• SMC-like chipsets with mixed modes (see ppbus(4))
Addingsupporttoanewchipset
You may want to add support for the newest chipset your motherboard was sold with. For the ISA bus, just
retrieve the specs of the chipset and write the corresponding ppc_mychipset_detect() function. Then add
an entry to the general purpose ppc_detect() function.
Your ppc_mychipset_detect() function should ensure that if the mode field of the flags boot variable is
not null, then the operating mode is forced to the given mode and no other mode is available and
ppb->ppb_avm field contains the available modes of the chipset.