From owner-freebsd-hardware Thu Aug 3 1:58:29 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from mass.osd.bsdi.com (adsl-63-202-177-42.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [63.202.177.42]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 02DA937B7FF for ; Thu, 3 Aug 2000 01:58:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from msmith@mass.osd.bsdi.com) Received: from mass.osd.bsdi.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mass.osd.bsdi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id CAA00860; Thu, 3 Aug 2000 02:09:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from msmith@mass.osd.bsdi.com) Message-Id: <200008030909.CAA00860@mass.osd.bsdi.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.1.1 10/15/1999 To: nate@yogotech.com (Nate Williams) Cc: hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD on Dell Inspiron In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 02 Aug 2000 21:28:36 MDT." <200008030328.VAA27596@nomad.yogotech.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 02:09:20 -0700 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > The PC Card software should, by default, choose available interrupts > > for PC Cards by default. > > And how would it do that, given that FreeBSD doesn't have drivers for > at least one or two pieces of hardware in the laptops, as well as the > fact that many drivers require BIOS support to work correctly. > > WinXX gets away with this because it can call BIOS functions, and > hardware vendors supply their own drivers to the OS vendor. Actually, we can get away with this as well, and we do. With the PnP probes and the 'unknown' placeholder, it's not all that hard to get at the relevant information. The *availability* of a given set of interrupts to the PCIC is not so trivial to determine, unfortunately. 8( Then again, I seem to remember that Brett was all for being able to boot FreeBSD after DOS has started, which would immediately remove our ability to do this, so perhaps he might want to sort his priorities out. 8) -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message