OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Add more Mini PCI slots

The content of this topic has been archived on 20 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

It seems that most of these routers support a full or partial PCI bus. Some of them even have miniPCI slots which break out all the PCI pins in a way that can "easily" be tapped into.
Are there any devices which could break out the PCI slot into multiple slots?
Could I just solder another slot on top of the existing one with the same pinout?

Thanks,
Adam

No, they each have to be individually selectable by the PCI controller.  There are mini-pci breakout boards, but they are difficult to find and I have no idea if the chips they use (they have to be active - they make the card look like a complete sub-pci bus) are properly supported by Linux. 

There are boards supported by OpenWrt  with multiple (mini)-PCI slots.  Using the x86 target you could try mini-ITX boards and the Soekris boards, and then moving to other architectures the Routerboard 532 supports two mini-PCI cards, as does the 112 and the 153 and 133 both support 3 mini-PCI cards.  But the support the the RB1xx series is still a bit experimental - there is at least one patch not (as far as I know) in svn yet which is needed for PCI support on the RB1xx series.

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