HELP! I need to be able to remove power from a PXI chassis and replace a card without rebooting the whole system

[bwbwbw]

I do not have particulars on the controller, but I am sure it's an NI chassis

and NI regular controller that has a serial cable leading back to the PC.

I am making this PXI rack into a debug rack for instrument cards,

so I need to be able to remove power from just the PXI chassis

and then replace the card with another one

or the same one and then turn the power back on and restart a

diagnostic test on the card WITHOUT

having to reboot the PC.

Is there a PCIe bridge setup that would allow me to do this?

Is there software that I need that can accomplish this?

[Peter-E]

Thanks for contacting NI Support!

All PXI modules are not hot swappable and will require that the host PC is rebooted. This is because all PCI/PXI buses are identified at power up and programs its PCI registers at that time. Turning off the PXI chassis while the PC is still on will likely damage the PXI cards. 

If we were to find a workaround to this, it will be important to know what chassis and controller you are using.

Are these modules running off of the embedded controller or off a host PC with a MXI cable? 

Have a great day!

[bwbwbw]

Yes

The Chassi is a NI PXI 1045

and the controller is a NI-PXI-8331

Let me re-enumerate my requirements:

Background:

I have a number of NI cards as well as other manufactured cards in the system.

One of these cards in the NI system is considered to be a UUT.

That is, I am using the NI card cage system and other cards in the system to test a CARD

during a manufacturing test of said UUT CARD.

The UUT uses a PLX 9030 for it's PCI interfacing.

This UUT is not designed for hot swap, and I do not bieleve it is plug and play.

Requirement:

1. I need to be able to shut off the chassis and remove the UUT when the test finishes, replace the tested UUT

with a unknown UUT, re-apply power and then test the new UUT WITHOUT having to reboot the PC.

...

I have tried several things, such as disabling the PCIe busses in the windows control panel, and then removing power

replacing the UUT with the next one, re-applying chassis power and then re-enabling the bus and SOMETIMES it works.

I need a very robust way to do this.

I also bought a CHROMA PXI-52906-E extender card with bus switches on it, so that I can remove power to the UUT

without shutting off the chassis. The card is supposedley designed so that when power is re-applied to the UUT, the necessary

signals to boot the PXI PCI interface is conducted, but I think something else has to be written to the card's PCI registers.

I am by no means an expert in PCI/PXI, 

but I seem to have exhausted all of my reserach online in how to meet my requirements.

Perhaps there is a way for the NI8331 controller to capture PCI configuration data to the card's on system boot,

and then "replay it" to my UUT after I re-apply power to the UUT?

Or perhaps PLX makes such a tool?

Any ideas?

[Robert__R]

It sounds like you've testing things at least very close to what I've seen USUALLY work. It's not supported, of course, and your milage may vary...

In device manager, I view devices by connection and disable the bridge that corresponds to the PXI-8331.  Then power cycle the chassis, then re-enable the PXI-8331.  Is that the bridge you're disabling?  One thing to note is that this works better if all the bridges are in series, which they are in the 1045.  However, if one of your cards has a PCI-PCI bridge it should be in the third segment.  If multiple cards have bridges you may be stuck.  One place I've seen this fail was when the chassis was sharing an interrupt with something on the host PC, and the interrupt was firing periodically.  I could see the TX/RX LEDs flashing about once per second even after disabling the bridge.  That system would freeze at the time of the next flash once I powered down the chassis.

When you use the extender, are you disabling your card in device manager before pulling it out?  Usually re-enabling the card will cause Windows to restore the resources to the card and restart the driver, so I'd expect that to work (most of the time).  You could see problems if toggling the switch causes glitches on the bus, and I'm not sure what it does with (or to) the backplane trigger signals.  The card breaks the spec for the PCI bus on the backplane by extending the signals and by placing additional capacitance on the lines, so ideally you'd have fewer cards in that segment to give it a better chance by reducing the loading on the bus.

- Robert

[bwbwbw]

I have tried many things. I have tried disabling drivers and using the extender card, but that never works.

I have tried disabling the PCI bridges and then re-enabling them after power had been cycled, and this worked for a spell,

but sometimes it doesn't work and the PC hangs really bad, and then I have shut it off to reset it.

(don't want to do that too much!) So now I just have the person reboot the PC everytime until I find a way to get what I want.

The Chroma extender card the has power control and bus switches does seem to lead to flakiness in the chassis when it is in.

But I am not so entirley sure this is true yet.

I have downloaded the free ware PCItree

that appears to run in Kernal mode, since it has acsess to all of the configuration registers

and you can reset any given bridge, but I still am trying this potential solution out.

There used to be a company that made PCI extenders and they had a program that worked with there extender cards to do exactly what I want,

but they were bought by Lecroy so I am going to inquire with Lecroy.

What I need is a way to confidently and quickly cycle power and remove and replace a single piece of UUT hardware without having to reboot windows

in a PLX chassis.