Date: Sat, 05 Dec 1998 22:53:29 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New drivers and install floppy space Message-ID: <199812060653.WAA02634@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 05 Dec 1998 00:28:05 EST." <199812050528.AAA13608@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
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> Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Mike Smith had > to walk into mine and say: > > > At the moment, the current exploratory strategy is the split kern.flp/ > > mfsroot.gz arrangement. It's probably going to make more sense just to > > have them as two floppy images for distribution purposes. > > > > The alternative will be to have a single minimal kernel and mfsroot > > floppy, and another floppy with a pile of KLD modules on it. This > > won't be feasible until the PCI code moves to the new bus architecture > > (soon we hope). > > I would like to see this too, but I would also like to see the > ability to provide 3rd party drivers during the install. This is core functionality for KLD and the new bootloader. The loader does (will do) a PnP scan before booting the kernel, and it will/can be set up to prompt the user for driver media at that point. > Not that > I really want to encourage people to copy the behavior of Windoze, > but it would make life easier for a lot of people (mainly us) to > be able to provide FreeBSD drivers in object code form on a floppy > diskette, and be able to specify 'install unlisted driver->have disk' > and have it show a list of drivers present on the diskette and > let the user load the ones he/she wants. In 99% of the cases, we don't want to ask the user to select the "right driver", we want to know that the media contains drivers for the given set of PnP ID's, and install them as required. Obviously user intervention is still going to be required for non-PnP ISA devices. > This would mean having an installation utility that can parse > some kind of description file that provides information about > the type of driver, its name, and special loading instructions. > We'd also need to provide a kit or sample Makefiles/scripts for > generating driver object files and the description files. Much of this is already implemeted; see the pnp* files in sys/boot/common and the 'pnpscan' command. What's still missing is support for catalog files and multiple driver media, but that's not much work. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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