Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 13 Oct 1995 07:59:18 +0100 (MET)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au
Subject:   Re: I/O port 0 == autoconfig? - RESULTS
Message-ID:  <199510130659.HAA03129@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <m0t3ZiH-000IvuC@nemesis.lonestar.org> from "Frank Durda IV" at Oct 12, 95 09:19:00 pm

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
As Frank Durda IV wrote:
> 
> 2.	"ACK, that's horrible, use -2 for auto-configuring devices",
> (3 rsp)	even though Mike indicated that handling negative numbers in the
> 	"visual" config editor was a problem.  This group mentioned no
> 	other problems with the rest of the idea.

The visual config should translate the negative numbers into something
better understandable ("N/A", and "AUTO", the user can hit "a" to say
AUTO).

> 3.	"Don't have *ANY* drivers that figure out where the hardware is
> (2 rsp)	 by searching for it using a clue list or any other mechanism.
>  	 Allow only a single-hardcoded location (resource)  per driver
> 	 that is used if -1 is present, and if that isn't where the
> 	 hardware is, the user must change the setting using config."
> 
> 	This group also claims it is easier for the user to figure out
> 	what the correct hardware settings are at boot time than to figure
> 	out where the driver *might* be looking if the driver looks in
> 	multiple places in the event a conflict occurs.  I have a hard time
> 	believing that part, and in believing that real conflicts happen
> 	that often when compared to drivers failing to locate or
> 	initialize properly their hardware because they were not "looking"
> 	in the right place.

Call by Christoph Badura (O'Reilly Germany, "in Unix" for already for
several years) on the phone:

``I've allowed somebody to use my notebook for installing Win95 onto
another one of those removable IDE drives.  Now that my original
NetBSD drive is back in, the keyboard does no longer work.  Do you
have an idea?''

As much for the record about Plague&Pray autoprobing...

PC hardware is mostly not designed to allow autoprobing.  Hardware
that really could be found by __reading__ some magic and guaranteed to
be unique ID (hey, is there such a thing as a ``unique ID''?)  out of
some register could perhaps be autoprobed.  Any hardware that even
requires a single write to a register before the probe value is
reliable cannot be autoprobed.

It is certainly _not_ easier for the user to find out and specify the
hardware parameters of all devices (nobody claimed this, unlike you're
pretending), but it saves their sanity.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199510130659.HAA03129>