Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 18:13:17 -0600 From: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> Cc: shelton@onr.com Subject: Re: pcmcia on freebsd Message-ID: <16743.11549.958394.767072@emerger.yogotech.com> In-Reply-To: <20041005.212850.35870802.imp@bsdimp.com> References: <415CEEFC.5080800@onr.com> <20041001145616.4F6555D09@ptavv.es.net> <20041005.212850.35870802.imp@bsdimp.com>
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> : > with what version of freebsd do pcmcia network cards work? > : > : PCMCIA PCcards (16 bit) worked starting with V4.3, I think. > > The ze driver was in 3.0, which supported NE-2000 pcmcia cards. By > about 3.2 base FreeBSD supported it. By about 3.4 or so had most of > the PAO support merged in. I wasn't going to jump in, but felt it was import for historical accuracy. FreeBSD 2.2.1 had the beginnings of Andrew's work (the original PCMCIA author) merged, and PHK merged in many of the PAO changes into 2.2.4. I merged in lots of things, and actually had two dozen different cards working in 2.2.6, and by 2.2.8 hot-swap 'mostly' worked for the set of existing drivers, partly due to PAO code, and partly due to my work. I've still got a dozen or so 3C589[ABCD] network cards, along with various NE2000 clones and various modems lying around that still work on the old laptops that I use on newer laptops today because they 'just work'. However, no dual-function cards worked at all, as you could only get a single function card to work (it was a crap shoot as to which function actually worked). Luckily, Warner took things over FreeBSD 3, and due to his hard-work and knowledge of the new bus framework (necessary for PCI and such, which PCCARD is related to), he was able to work through much of the hacks/kludges that were made over the years to make things work, such that by FreeBSD 4 he was now able to make multi-cards work, as well as provide a much better framework for removable drivers and modules. The work I did in the FreeBSD 2.2 was really a hack to try and make PCMCIA (ie; ISA) drivers removable. It worked, and sometimes even worked well. Ironically, my ThinkPads running FreeBSD 2.2.8 were able to do perform reliable card swaps, along with hibernation/suspend/resume, which many of the newer laptops *still* can't due due. Most of the problems are due to ACPI being harder to implement than APM, so many of today's BIOS's are extremely buggy as compared to their counter-parts using APM years ago.... Nate
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