PCMCIA Support PCMCIA for x86

3. PCMCIA Support

Supported Platforms

Table 1 and Table 2 show which x86 BSPs support PCMCIA and which do not.

Table 1 BSPs Supporting PCMCIA for x86

Architecture	BSPs	Board


i386	pc386	PC 386/486
i486	pc486	PC 386/486
ns486	ns486	National Semiconductor NS486SXF
Pentium	pcPentium	PC Pentium
PentiumPro, Pentium II	pcPentiumpro	PC PentiumPro/II

Table 2 BSPs Not Supporting PCMCIA for x86

Architecture	BSPs¹	Board


i386	epc4 ev386ex	Radisys EPC4 EV386EX

1: These BSPs are compatible with the PCMCIA libraries and function calls.

The BSPs in Table 1 support the PCMCIA chips and PC cards shown in Table 3.

Table 3 Hardware Supported

Supported PCMCIA Chips		Supported PC Cards


Intel 82365 series		ATA PC card
Cirrus Logic PD6712/20/22		SRAM PC card
Vadem VG468		3Com Etherlink III PC card
VLSI 82c146		Flash PC card
Ricoh RF5C series
Databook DB86082

Hardware Tested

The PCMCIA function in VxWorks has been tested on the following targets:

Laptops with PCMCIA slots:

Toshiba Satellite

Dell Latitude XPi

NEC Versa-V/50

PCMCIA adapters for desktop PCs:

Curtis PCMCIA PCCS2 Carddrive

Databook PCMCIA adapter TMP-250

Unsupported Hardware and Features

The following hardware/functions are not supported by PCMCIA for x86:

The ATA twin PC card is not supported.

Hot swapping is not supported for the 3Com Etherlink III PC card.

Hot Swapping

The following concerns may arise:

Hot swapping in the middle of a data transaction might cause data loss.

It takes a few seconds to initialize the ATA PC card after a hot insertion.

Boot Utility

There are three utilities: mkbootFd, mkbootAta, and mkbootTffs. For detailed information on the new utility, see the VxWorks Programmer's Guide: Intel x86. New features include:

New Boot Device - You may now load VxWorks from the PCMCIA card.

Create an IDE Boot Disk from VxWorks - A new routine, mkbootAta( ), builds a local IDE disk; the boot device is now ata instead of ide.