Methods and apparatuses for automatic bank switching in a host adapter

Abstract

A PCI to SCSI host adapter circuit is provided for use with different types of host platforms. The host adapter includes logic and controller circuits, and a memory having multiple drivers and a bank switching instruction set stored therein. During initialization, the first driver is loaded into the host's memory if the host's processor is of a compatible type. Otherwise, the bank switching instruction set is loaded into the host's memory and interpreted by the host's processor. During interpretation, the bank switching instruction set causes the host's processor to signal the logic circuit to request that the controller circuit re-map another driver to the location of the first driver in the memory. After this bank switching has occurred, the selected driver is loaded into the host's memory, provided of course that the host's processor is of a compatible type. This process may be repeated until the appropriate code type is found or the host processor is not supported.