From owner-freebsd-current Mon Nov 30 05:32:00 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA26191 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 05:32:00 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (ppp7.portal.net.au [202.12.71.107]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA26181 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 05:31:55 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dingo.cdrom.com (8.9.1/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA00547; Sun, 29 Nov 1998 01:10:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Message-Id: <199811290910.BAA00547@dingo.cdrom.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: Robert Nordier cc: abial@nask.pl (Andrzej Bialecki), freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Probing devices in bootloader In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 16 Nov 1998 12:32:04 +0200." <199811161032.MAA00785@ceia.nordier.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 01:10:17 -0800 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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