Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 09:06:31 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Brian Astill <bastill@sa.apana.org.au> Cc: questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: What does 'added driver support' mean? Message-ID: <20010311090631.D75895@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <0103101033270A.26742@PhD_1.testname.com.au>; from bastill@sa.apana.org.au on Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 10:27:12AM %2B1030 References: <0103101033270A.26742@PhD_1.testname.com.au>
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On Saturday, 10 March 2001 at 10:27:12 +1030, Brian Astill wrote:
> Found this in the 3.1 Release notes:
>
> 1. What's new since 3.0-RELEASE
> ---------------------------------
> 1.1. KERNEL CHANGES
> -------------------
> Added driver support for pocket ethernet adapters based on the
> RealTek RTL 8002 chip.
>
>
> What does this mean in practice?
> That if you have the driver from somewhere, 3.1 can use it?
No, it's a rather obfuscated way of saying "we now have a device
driver for..."
> That a driver is supplied and can be compiled into the kernel on
> request?
It doesn't even say that. Maybe it's in the default ("GENERIC")
kernel.
> (How? - I saw no mention of it in sysinstall Rel 4.2)
sysinstall won't tell you how to build a kernel, and it also won't
tell you what is supported. You can either build a new kernel or load
an LKM. Building the kernel is described both in the handbook and in
"The Complete FreeBSD".
> Is it automatic that this "driver support" is also present in
> Release 4.2?
Not completely. But you can assume that some support will be carried
over for all except the oldest or mouldiest boards. The place to look
is in HARDWARE.TXT on the first CD-ROM, but I don't see it in there.
This is obviously a case of "suck it and see". In any case, if you're
running FreeBSD on a laptop, use the newest version you can get.
Greg
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