ThinkPad Question

[Mike Bilow]

Derek Atkins wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 DA> Um, does Linux support MicroChannel?  It never used to. 
 DA> Perhaps this is new in Linux 2.2, but I doubt it.  It is
 DA> certainly true that MicroChannel support has never made it
 DA> into the Linux mainline, at least as of 2.0.

 DA> A number of years ago I was trying to use a ThinkPad 720,
 DA> but Linux just wouldn't work due to the MCC losage.

There has been some nominal support for MCA in Linux for quite a while, but it
rarely gets used and has never been properly tested as far as I know.  There
are almost certainly problems which have crept into even the parts that worked
as the rest of the kernel has evolved.  In theory, MCA itself is not all that
different from any other system, differing mostly in the BIOS facilities.

As for MCA laptops, I have no idea how different these are from MCA desktops. 
Remember, a lot of my background is OS/2 internals, where MCA is extremely well
supported for obvious reasons.  But the MCA world is different even in subtle
and arbitrary ways that have little to do with the bus or the BIOS, such as
running the SCSI IDs backwards, but which have to be accounted for ad hoc in
various hardware drivers.
 
-- Mike


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