This repository contains two old projects of mine that I am publishing on GitHub for preservation purposes.
Both projects contain Linux 2.0/2.1 device drivers for the AMCC S5933 PCI controller chip developed in the late 1990s.
The drivers where developed by me and Toni Giorgino in 1997-1999 as members of the research group that was developing the APEmille SIMD massively parallel computer.
An interesting article describing the status of the project in the fall of 1997 is available here.
Having graduated in 1996, I consider this my first professionally developed, production ready code.
The S5933 is a generic controller that board manufacturers could use to develop PCI 2.1 compliant devices without the need to develop the complex logic needed to interact with the PCI bus.
Once programmed at startup through the use of a nvRAM, the chip could provide different levels of functionality to the application logic sitting behind it.
More info can be found in the included datasheet.
The s5933 directory contains a generic Linux 2.0/2.1 device driver for the S5933.
This driver was mainly used with the S5933 developers kit to gain a better knowledge of the chip while waiting for the development of our custom hardware.
Given the lack of a specialized hardware, the driver is completely generic and allows C programs to use all the communications channel implemented by the S5933.
A detailed description of the functionality can be found in the project's README file.
The generic driver was greatly enhanced by Toni Giorgino to support our custom hardware, the so-called "Autobahn" serial communication boards specifically developed for the APEmille project.
This driver can be found in the autobahn directory.
Again, a very good description of the Autobahn hardware and of the features of this driver can be found in the README.