Re: Mac's PCI
Re: Mac's PCI
- Subject: Re: Mac's PCI
- From: Brian Willoughby <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:45:10 -0800
[ Does anyone know the hardware differences between the Mac and PC's
[ PCI buses?
There should be no difference. The PCI bus is an independent electrical
specification that should be implemented according to design, no matter what
the processor. Look in your local bookstore or library for the Addison Wesley
book on PCI.
[ I suppose there are differences, because for almost all the
[ existing PCI boards, there are no drivers for Mac.
Drivers are software. Software is compiled for a particular processor (unless
you're talking about NEXTSTEP, where the executable could contain code for
multiple processors). The primary reason for missing Mac drivers is that Macs
use the PowerPC and PCs use Intel or clone CPUs. It's not a difference in the
PCI implementation on Macs, but a lack of effort on the part of the driver
developers to follow through with support for the Mac.
A secondary reason for missing Mac drivers is that each operating system has a
different mechanism for handling drivers. Windows has a completely different
driver architecture than Mac OS 9, which is different yet again from Mac OS X.
The exception, again, is an operating system like NEXTSTEP, where the same
operating system runs on multiple processors, and in this case the driver
architecture is the same. I'm not aware of any examples, but it seems possible
that a PCI driver written to NEXTSTEP's DriverKit architecture could be
compiled for both i386 and ppc and made available as a fat binary.
P.S. There are a few PCI cards, particularly video cards, which have
throwbacks to older PC bus conventions - for compatibility. These cards may
cause serious headaches on a Mac PCI, but I would say this has more to do with
the card not being a pure PCI card and nothing to do with the Mac PCI bus
implementation itself.
Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting
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