From owner-freebsd-questions Sat May 23 23:35:41 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA22132 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Sat, 23 May 1998 23:35:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from gdi.uoregon.edu (gdi.uoregon.edu [128.223.170.30]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA22126 for ; Sat, 23 May 1998 23:35:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by gdi.uoregon.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA09373; Sat, 23 May 1998 23:35:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu) Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 23:35:36 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White Reply-To: Doug White To: Ray Black cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hardware Support In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 20 May 1998, Ray Black wrote: > I've got one of the dread Compaq Prosignia VS servers with the unsupported > NCR 53c710 Fast-SCSI-2 controller integrated with the EISA bus. Why > is this board not supported? I mean, it's not as though it were an > extremely rare computer, so what are the hardware problems that cause no > one in the BSD (or even the Linux) community to support it? My guesses are as follows: . Those who are capable of programming for this card don't have a card handy to hack with. . Until recently Compaq products were lameducks because their Ethernet cards weren't supported either. Now that there is a driver for their NICs it may spur someone to undertake a development effor. > I'm far from a > great programmer, but if someone would point me to info on how to write > device drivers, I'd do what I could to make that sucker work. NCR/Symbios are pretty outgoing with specs, see http://www.symbios.com. Symbios is the SCSI subsidiary of NCR that was spun off of NCR/AT&T. > Also, on a silimar note, it would seem like something that could be ported > over from SCO fairly easily (and I'm no trademark or copyright lawyer, so > I don't know the ramifications of that), yet it's not been done. What > would be the limitations of that move, beyond the legal ones? SCO is *completely* different from FreeBSD. Porting from SCO (esp. device drivers) isn't as easy as it looks. SCO is SVR4 based while we are 4.4BSD based -- it's the difference between Chevy and BMW. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message