Getting Started PCMCIA on ST40 boards

Introduction

The aim of this guide is to illustrate how to use PCMCIA hardware with ST40 based systems. PCMCIA support on the ST40 is still a little rough around the edges, but hopefully this will improve over time.

Supported boards

The only board with fully supported PCMCIA is the MB374. The PCMCIA slots on the MB350 (Extended HARP) are very limited, and as such are not supported. PCI Cardbus add in cards are not supported either, although we would add support for these if needed.

Installing the RPMS

Install the approprate RPM for the board you are working with. Note that at the moment, the RPMS actually conflict with one another, so only install one at a time. PCMCIA support is actually turned off by default. You will need to edit the target file /etc/pcmcia.conf, to enable pcmcia, and give the appropriate options. For example, for an MB374 it should look like:

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS="irq_mode=1 irq_list=5,7 use_isa_irqs=1"
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=

Next, you must run depmod on the target, to update the module. Finally, you can now reboot the board or start up the pcmcia subsystem by running /etc/init.d/pcmcia start.

Hopefully, you should now be able to plug PCMCIA cards into and out of the slots, you should get a message telling you what sort of cards has been plugged in and the scripts should set everything up correctly. For more information refer to the PCMCIA project page