London, UK: Executive members of the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group (PICMG), a consortium of over 600 companies that collaboratively develop open specifications for use in communication computing applications, have adopted changes to PICMG 2.12 to reflect the expansion of this specification to cover more advanced system availability software aspects beyond simply hot swapping a single board in a CompactPCI system.
The 2.12 specification now defines operating system and hardware independent software interfaces for Redundant Host systems. Redundant Host systems can transfer control of a chassis or a set of peripheral slots from one CPU blade to another in the event of a software or hardware failure. These interfaces are designed to be applicable to a wide range of hardware architectures, including traditional Redundant System Slot (RSS) systems, as well as new architectures based on recent switched PCI technologies.
Other enhancements in Revision 2.0 of the 2.12 specification include updates arising from Revision 2.0 of the PICMG 2.1 CompactPCI Hot Swap specification; hardware and operating system independent software interfaces for determining the geographic aspects of a system so that applications can interact with operators in a simple and precise way regarding its slots and boards; updates reflecting the recent release of Microsoft Windows XP and the Linux 2.4 kernel.
The focus of the Engineering Change Notice ECN 001 to PICMG 2.9 Compact PCI System Management, approved at the same meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, is to define a way for hardware-independent software to determine important management information regarding CompactPCI backplanes, the slots they implement and the boards that occupy those slots.
Specifically, software can now determine: * Geographic Addresses (or physical slot numbers) to guide a maintenance person to specific slot
* Logical PCI addresses (based on the bus, device and function numbers) by which operating systems and device drivers access the boards in those slots
* PCI and H.110 bus connectivity
* PICMG 2.16 Ethernet connectivity
* PICMG 2.17 StarFabric connectivity.
"These efforts illustrate PICMG's recognition of the growing importance of software standardization to the adoption of open hardware standards," said PICMG technical officer Dick Somes of Force Computers.
"The updates further enhance the modularity and interoperability of the CompactPCI architecture by enabling operating system and hardware independent management tools," added Mark Overgaard of Pigeon Point Systems, who chairs the Software Interoperability Subcommitee that developed both 2.12 R2.0 and the ECN 01 to 2.9.
