TI PCI-2040

[Allen_W.]

Is there any support for the TI PCI-2040 bridge chip? Are there any LabVIEW drivers already developed? Can the registers be written to and read directly with low-level VISA functions? How would memory be mapped from the PCI bus side to the device side of the bridge chip?

Allen

[rolfk]

Programming hardware is NOT the task of an application, and LabVIEW is an application running in user space. Trying to do that right away will cause a General Protection Fault error on any reasonably modern OS. You can of course try to access Port IO addresses through the Port IO VIs, but PCI bus addresses are not anymore fixed and need access to privileged OS services to resolve properly. Otherwise if you start to use fixed addresses for this using Port IO access, it will most probably only work on a particular computer and may even fail next time you restart your computer or resume from standby with a different PCMCIA or whatever card inserted.
These are all things only a device driver can do properly and so if you want to access hardware behind a PCI bridge, you
really have to develop a device driver for this hardware to work under any Windows NT type, Linux or OS X system. The PCI bridge on the system board is not really programmed by you anyhow but by the OS which provides you with services to make use of the hardware.
Fortunately developing a device driver only requires advanced C knowledge nowadays, it used to require also profound assembly language knowledge only a few years ago.

Rolf K