Re: [MiNT] New MiNT updates

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, [ISO-8859-1] Jörg Westheide wrote:

> Currently MiNT initiates a DMA transfer and then waits for it's completition
> (so the execution of processes is blocked while the transfer is taking
> place). With Background DMA the kernel has to take care about some things
> while the transfer is running:
> - not to access the memory accessed by the transfer
> - not to start a new transfer while the current one is not finished
> (may be that I forgot something)

That is a much clearer explanation, and I think I now understand the issue
much better. Thank you.

I imagine that hardware-wise, the DMA is already performed while the CPU
continues to run, thus hardware-wise background DMA is no different to the
currently implemented scheme, is that true?

To me it doesn't sound like that should be extremely difficult to
implement. Never having worked on MiNT I would not want to try doing it
myself but are any of the MiNT hackers thinking of doing that?

-- 
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| Mario Becroft                * Tariland, New Zealand Atari User Group |
| mb@tos.pl.net                * Atari Hardware Developments            |
| http://www.pl.net/~mario/    * Atari Serial Mouse Interface           |
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