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Reply-To: <SimsS@IBM.Net>
From: "Steve Sims" <SimsS@IBM.Net>
To: "Nate Williams" <nate@mt.sri.com>
Cc: "Hackers" <Hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Building PAO kernel on non-PAO system
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 14:52:11 -0500
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Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> says:
|
| > I've got an old laptop that I'd like to run Our Favorite OS(tm) on, but
it
| > **definitely** requires the PAO package to sort out some laptop-esque
| > "features" that Compaq decided to implement.  I've got 2.1.6 loaded on
the
| > laptop right now (with PAO) and it works pretty well....  (Thanks,
| > Hosokawa-san!)
| 
| You could install 2.2 on it and it would *probably* work.

Well, it didn't work the *last* time I tried.  (About 3 months ago; Same-old
Same-old with the silly sio probes failing was the biggest headache.)

| One of the reasons the PAO code isn't in the FreeBSD source tree is
| because it affects 'desktop' functionality.  I would caution against
| applying the PAO patches to the -current box.

Yeah, this would be a bad idea, one of last resort.

| Have you tried making a kernel with -current and seeing it it works?
| The PAO patches add support for some new ethernet cards, SCSI cards, and
| the Wavelan, plus make some things easier but other than that it's
| pretty much the same functionality as in 2.2 and -current (modulo they
| actually *document* things better. :( )

I'll try my luck with a plain vanilla 2.2-GAMMA and see what happens.  (I'm
not optimistic, but I may be surprised.)

What does surprise me is that there isn't a *obvious* way to build kernels
or, for that matter, hardware- and kernel-structure-specific apps for various
architectures, versions and configurations on a single machine and distribute
them to one or more "client" machines.  I've run shops where this would have
been a REQUIREMENT (e.g.: a farm of diskless workstations in a variety of
interfaces, processors, etc...)

...sjs...