PCI:
Selecting a motherboard
Discussion:
A computer motherboard used with a Flowcon batcher must allow the manual assignment of
interrupt numbers to its PCI board slots. In the BIOS (CMOS) setup, there should be a
section on setting up PCI peripherals (PNP/PCI Configuration).
Setting the
BIOS (CMOS):
On system boot, enter the BIOS setup screens by repeatedly pressing the "DEL"
key.
 | Go to the "PNP/PCI
Configuration" section. |
| Set the "PNP OS
installed" field to "Yes". |
| Set the interrupt for the
PCI slot containing the first Flowcon board (see "Selecting a Board Slot") to
"INT7".
 | Note: PCI slot numbers start
from the slot closest to the CPU (slot #1) and proceed to the outer edge of the
motherboard. |
|
| Verify settings using the
Realtime Clock test using (IDIAGPCI) |
If the above fails, and if
your motherboard allows "not assigned" as an interrupt selection.
| Set the Flowcon PCI slot to
"not assigned". |
| Then see if the motherboard
allows software assignment of the interrupt.
| All motherboard chipsets are
supposed to allow this. |
| In practice (because this
feature is virtually never used), about 50% do not. |
|
| If your motherboard does not
have a section for manually assigning interrupt numbers to PCI slots it probably will not
work, since accidently getting them right is pretty remote. |
Testing the
Interrupt assignment:
Load the PCI integrated
diagnostic (IDIAGPCI) and run the Realtime Clock test.
| If this test passes, the
interrupt is successfully assigned. |
| If the test fails, the
motherboard is not suitable for use with a Flowcon batcher.
|
|
