Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 10:49:20 +0100 From: Timo Geusch <freebsd@sleepycat.ukpeople.net> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: PNPifying the 'ep' driver Message-ID: <19990620104920.A15330@tabby.sleepycat.ukpeople.net>
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Hi all, I sent a similar mail to -current a while ago but by the number of responses I got i believe it was the wrong forum. Please bear with me while I go about it again. Problem: One of my FreeBSD boxes is loaded nearly to capacity with ISA and PCI cards. In order to make it work at all I had to disable some of the on-board peripherals (like IDE) and rely on PNP and PCI confiugration to sort out the remaining mess. While everything works fine(?) in "evil Bill's" comsumer OSs I have to rip out the sound card every time to make FreeBSD work. As this was not doing the MoBo or my temper any good I started to investigate why. It turns out that the problem seems to be the way that 3Com 3C509s handle PNP. Set to PNP mode, the card patiently waits for the BIOS to assign I/O and IRQ. When the ep driver does go about to query the card, it returns the cards preferred default settings, not the PNP assigned ones. Big Ouch, as the card driver suddenly waits for the Soundblaster AWE32 to trigger an interrupt so it can go about reading data from the card :-(. To the OSs creadit networking still works, albeit with a 64 sec ping roundtrip time ... Well, I dug deeper and found that the ep driver had been spared the embarrasment of being converted to the pnp framework ;-). An hours worth of hacking solved that but now I hit an impasse that I can't seem to resolve with out the card documentation. Questions: 1. I emailed 3Com support asking 'Where could I get a Technical Reference Manual for this card?'. They acknowledged that the had passed that email on internally but are obviously taking their time to answer this question. Does anyone have a contact inside 3Com that might be able to help speed up this process a bit? Or alternatively, can anyone help out with the relevant information while I wait for 3Com to come back to me? 2. From what I see so far I would have to reconfigure the card inside the driver (much like a PCMCIA card is configured on insertion). Am I breaking any unwritten rules here? I obviously want to have the changes put into the tree once everyone is satisfied that they work, so I better make sure that I don't violate any unwritten rules here. Regards, Timo To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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