Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 01:10:17 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Robert Nordier <rnordier@nordier.com> Cc: abial@nask.pl (Andrzej Bialecki), freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Probing devices in bootloader Message-ID: <199811290910.BAA00547@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 16 Nov 1998 12:32:04 %2B0200." <199811161032.MAA00785@ceia.nordier.com>
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> Andrzej Bialecki wrote: > > With the advent of the new booloader, I think it's possible now to do > > device probing from inside the bootloader. Let's suppose that each kernel > > module would have a special initialization section, which could be used in > > BTX environment. After all, most probing is just checking for the presence > > of some signatures at given locations, and this can easily be done in BTX > > environment, right? > > Some probing is a fair bit more complex than this (see src/sys/isa/sio.c, > for example). Currently, BTX is not sophisticated enough to handle > various requirements (for instance, the interrupt flag is not virtualized; > and interrupts can't be disabled in ring 3). To do this with the new bootloader, you would probably write a small snippet of Forth (or possibly we could implement a tiny load/exec interface) for device probing, and then ship a separate "probe/ enumerate" module with each driver. Needless to say, this would complicate things significantly. In reality, it is only non-PnP ISA devices that require this sort of support; all other PnP devices are probed (and modules loaded where appropriate) using their corresponding probe mechanisms. I'm not really in favour of adding too much support for legacy ISA; it's dying fast and trivial manual configuration in either the kernel config or the loader script is probably more than adequate. -- \\ 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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