Parallels 7 PCIE Addresses

[NEUengineer]

I have a parallel port PCIE card on my MP. I'm using Parallels 7 to run windows so that I can use a program called Mach3. Anyway, my problem is that I need to identify the port address of the PCIE card in Mach3 so that I can communicate with some hardware.

Right now under ports in device manager it shows:

Resource type Setting
I/O Range 4000-4007
I/O Range 4008-4008

What would I enter for a port address? The default in Mach3 shows up as 0x378 or 0x278.

 

[drambuie]

The port addresses 0378 and 0278 are the standard parallel port addresses allocated to LPT2 and LPT3 respectively. The 4000 - 4008 range is the port address range of the PCIe card controller itself. There should be other port addresses with 0378 - 037F and 0278 - 027F ranges, which would be the addresses for attached printers or other parallel devices. On PCs, those should be the only addresses needed to access the parallel port. The system should map the applicable parallel card PCIe address.

What happens if you use an LPT2 or 3 address as specified by the app? Is there a Windows driver for the card?

 

[NEUengineer]

I seem to bet getting some communication using the address "0x4000" but in bootcamp only. Something might not be fully correct yet, but it's connected to the board to some degree. Is there any reason parallels wouldn't let me use addresses the same way bootcamp does?

 

[drambuie]

With Parallels, Windows is running on top of OS X, so it could be that Windows is not able to access the hardware directly through those addresses. With bootcamp Windows is basically running native on the hardware. Have you checked the parallel card's port addresses when running in the bootcamp partition? Also, have you checked the card's port addresses under OS X?

 

[NEUengineer]

The address under a reboot with boot camp is:

Resource type Setting
I/O Range 4000-4007
I/O Range 4008-4008

but the OSX address is:

pci1415,c110:

Type: Parallel Port
Driver Installed: No
MSI: No
Bus: PCI
Slot: Slot-3
Vendor ID: 0x1415
Device ID: 0xc110
Subsystem Vendor ID: 0x1415
Subsystem ID: 0xc110
Revision ID: 0x0000
Link Width: x1
Link Speed: 2.5 GT/s

I have no idea which address to use. It would make sense though, that it would have an OSX address when using parallels.

 

[drambuie]

What strikes me as odd here, is that the OS X PCIe addresses are also the vendor and device IDs.

Is your PCIe parallel card specifically for the Mac Pro, or is it a generic desktop PC card?

The fact that the 400x port addresses give partial functionality with the external device indicates that you have successful communication with the device, so the parallel card appears to be functioning. The problem may be between your software and the external device. You aren't operating in a true PC environment, so there could be driver or other issues.

 

[NEUengineer]

It was some generic card from Newegg that looks like it wasn't a POS. Using Parallels, that makes sense, but when i boot up with boot camp, it is running Windows just like any other PC except that Apple made the boards inside this one.

I still can't confirm what exactly is happening and if it's direct communication, or what is going on. What worries me is that it responds intermittently, not every time i do the same function.

As a side note, I can run Windows 7 just as fast in Parallels with 12GB and the two dual-core 3.0's just as fast as my Dell 3500 work station (work computer) can.

 

[dyn]

If you have a PCIe card that you need to use in the virtual machine itself you can forget it. There is no desktop (!) virtualisation tool that allows this. That includes Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion and Oracle Virtualbox (these are the only 3 available for Mac). The problem is that you need something called VT-D aka PCIe Passthrough in both hardware and software. In most cases both do not support VT-D. If you turn to server products such as VMware ESXi you have VT-D support in that so you only need hardware that also supports it. Even with the hardware and software supporting it, the passthrough can be quite troublesome though.

In other words: what you are trying to accomplish simply isn't possible. You need to run Windows via Boot Camp because then it runs natively on the Apple hardware: you turn the Mac into a PC. This way you can access any PCIe device if you have the appropriate Windows drivers. This is also how that application was designed and what it is expecting. Not everything is suited for virtualisation. Unfortunately you seem to have found one of those things.

 

[NEUengineer]

Yeah that's what it's looking like. The "port" option is not even available under the device manager when in parallels. Not the end of the world, but it would have been a lot easier to just use parallels. The whole 30 seconds to shut down and boot up is horrible. Damn those SSD's...