From owner-freebsd-alpha Wed May 10 13: 4: 4 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from front2m.grolier.fr (front2m.grolier.fr [195.36.216.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 902AD37B6C4; Wed, 10 May 2000 13:03:59 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from groudier@club-internet.fr) Received: from ppp-107-212.villette.club-internet.fr (ppp-107-212.villette.club-internet.fr [194.158.107.212]) by front2m.grolier.fr (8.9.3/No_Relay+No_Spam_MGC990224) with ESMTP id VAA22316; Wed, 10 May 2000 21:54:09 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 21:39:12 +0200 (CEST) From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Roudier?= X-Sender: groudier@linux.local To: "David O'Brien" Cc: "Koster, K.J." , "'FreeBSD Alpha mailing list'" Subject: Re: sio, nrc and sym questions for NoName In-Reply-To: <20000510084529.A91343@dragon.nuxi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I will reply to this one. :) On Wed, 10 May 2000, David O'Brien wrote: > On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 04:55:50PM +0100, Koster, K.J. wrote: > > > What is the date of your kernel? The `sym' maintainer just=20 > > > added suport for the NCR 810 chip. =20 > > > > > Dunno the date, but it's the 4.0 Release iso image from ftp.FreeBSD.org= =2E > > With only 16Mb RAM I'm not going to build the world anytime soon. >=20 > Ah. The `sym' 810 support was just added, so it is not in 4.0. > =20 >=20 > > > I use the `ncr' driver on my AS 250 and have no problems with=20 > > > it. So it isn't like using `ncr' is a terriable thing. IMHO the What I can understand from the source let me think that the `ncr' has no obvious software bugs. The driver is probably quite reliable with legacy NCR 810, 815, 825. For some recent SYMBIOS chip types of early revisions, the `ncr' driver may trigger some chip errata that could not be known by the maintainers of this driver. I could carefully examine the code, compare against the errata listings I have and add 'on paper' and untested fixes, but this would just be time wasted for me given the `sym'. Btw, the `sym' learnt a lot from `ncr', as you can read in the header of each `sym' driver source files. > > > comments beside `ncr' and `sym' in the GENERIC kernel > > > configuration file tell this. > > > > Oh? It was my understanding that the ncr driver was to be replaced by t= he > > sym driver at some point. I guess that's a while off then. >=20 > I never thought it was supose to for legacy devices. But then Gerald > surprised me by adding 810(non A) and 825(non A) support to `sym'. Hmmm... I am still able to change my mind at any time and I am proud of that. :-) The short term plan for `sym' looks like: - Current sym-1.5.3 MFCed to both RELENG_4 and RELENG_3. - MFC to RELENG_4 should normally happen over the week-end. My major project about `sym' for this year is to reduce time spent for drivers maintainance and also make this driver really portable. Support for legacy NCR chips was part of this project, since it will allow me to mostly have a single driver (modulo about 1000-1500 lines of code per O/S) to maintain for all the targetted O/Ses (At least Linux and FreeBSD, obviously). G=E9rard. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message