From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Oct 13 00:22:39 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id AAA18617 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 00:22:39 -0700 Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id AAA18611 for ; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 00:22:28 -0700 Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id IAA10041; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 08:20:42 +0100 Received: by sax.sax.de (8.6.11/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id IAA12906; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 08:20:42 +0100 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.9) id HAA03129; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 07:59:19 +0100 From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199510130659.HAA03129@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: I/O port 0 == autoconfig? - RESULTS To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 07:59:18 +0100 (MET) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: from "Frank Durda IV" at Oct 12, 95 09:19:00 pm X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 2354 Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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. ;-)