Software Driver Installation
Interrupt Sharing
(c) Spectrum GmbH
23
Software Driver Installation
Before using the board a driver must be installed that matches the operating system. The installation is done in different ways depending on
the used operating system. The driver that is on CD supports all cards of the M2i/M3i series. That means that you can use the same driver
for all cards of these families.
With the CD revision 3.00 (June 2010) the CD structure was revised and the root folder of the Windows driv-
ers was changed from „spcm_driver“ to „Driver“. The screen shots shown in the installation chapters might
still show the former version.
Interrupt Sharing
This board uses a PCI interrupt for DMA data transfer and for controlling the FIFO mode. The used interrupt line is allocated by the PC BIOS
at system start and is normally depending on the selected slot. Because there is only a limited number of interrupt lines available on the PCI
bus it can happen that two or more boards must use the same interrupt line. This so called interrupt sharing must be supported by all drivers
of the participating equipment.
Most available drivers and also the Spectrum driver for your board can manage interrupt sharing. But there are also some drivers on the
market that can only use one interrupt exclusively. If this equipment shares an interrupt with the Spectrum board, the system will hang up if
the second driver is loaded (the time is depending on the operating system).
If this happens it is necessary to reconfigure the system in that way that the critical equipment has an exclusive access to an interrupt.
On most systems the BIOS shows a list of all installed PCI boards with their allocated interrupt lines directly after system start. You have to
check whether an interrupt line is shared between two boards. Some BIOS allow the manual allocation of interrupt lines. Have a look in your
mainboard manual for further information on this topic.
Because normally the interrupt line is fixed for one PCI slot it is simply necessary to use another slot for the critical board to force a new
interrupt allocation. You have to search a configuration where all critical boards have only exclusive access to one interrupt.
Depending on the system, using the Spectrum board with a shared interrupt may degrade performance a little. Each interrupt needs to be
checked by two drivers. For this reason when using time critical FIFO mode even the Spectrum board should have an exclusively access to
one interrupt line.
Important Notes on Driver Versions 2.22 and Control Center 1.41 and newer
With Windows driver version V2.22 and later required internal driver changes were needed, such that Windows 2000 is no longer com-
patible with the WDM driver version.
Windows 2000 users should use the driver version 2.11 (available as separate download from the Spectrum
homepage), because with driver version V2.22 on, this operating system is no longer supported.
Windows 2000 users should also use the Control Center version 1.41 (available as separate download from
the Spectrum homepage), because with driver version V1.42 on, this operating system is no longer support-
ed.
