[Cu-wireless] Quick NETGEAR MA301 802.11b Wireless PCI Adapter Question

[Clint Popetz]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 01:14:32PM -0600, David Young wrote:
> 
> I have no idea what I'm talking about. Do tell me if I'm wrong, but:
> I think CardBus is to PCI as PCMCIA is to ISA.  

Yes.

> That is, CardBus is 32-bit, with IRQs assigned by the hardware, etc.
> It follows (I think) that you're probably not going to find any ISA
> device that will receive a CardBus card.  

They do exist (or have); they're just more complicated.  Datatech (I
think; it was some similar pointless tech industry name) sold one for
a while, but discontinued it.

You can bridge anything together of course, but at a cost.  In this
case, you still have to manually tell the driver for the adaptor how
to assign IRQs, and then the adaptor lies to the cards.  The adaptor
also does manages the 16/32 bit problem, at the cost of throughput (so
not good for things like wide SCSI) and also sometimes provoking
subtle bugs in hardware that had timing dependencies that weren't well
debugged, which is why I believe they ended up dropping the adaptor.

			-Clint