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Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 23:16:25 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199503211316.XAA15950@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: gibbs@estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU, peter@bonkers.taronga.com
Subject: Re: SVNET Meeting?
Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, gibbs@freefall.cdrom.com, hackers@freefall.cdrom.com,
        jkh@freefall.cdrom.com, rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
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>Oh man.... Hmmm...  The firmware is < 2k.  Its basically an array of
>byte values that the driver dumps to the card.  The current setup
>is the best setup except that it contaminates the GENERIC kernel
>(ie, if someone decides its okay for them to use this driver, it works
>without haveing to do anything special on their part except configure
>for the controller.)  If you can think of a way for the driver to 
>read in an additional file during boot, then we can distribute the 
>firmware separately.

There will have to be a another stage in the boot for 2.1.  This
is not hard to implement, except for the dosboot and possibly the
netboot.  The dosboot and the netboot are already out of date.
The netboot lacks support for BIOS drive geometries (which is
essential for correct operation of fdisk and sysinstall) and both
lack support for BIOS memory sizes.

Bruce