From owner-freebsd-current Tue Jan 18 22:44:55 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from rover.village.org (rover.village.org [204.144.255.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 937E91512C for ; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 22:44:52 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from imp@harmony.village.org) Received: from harmony.village.org (harmony.village.org [10.0.0.6]) by rover.village.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA72061; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 23:44:49 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from imp@harmony.village.org) Received: from harmony.village.org (localhost.village.org [127.0.0.1]) by harmony.village.org (8.9.3/8.8.3) with ESMTP id XAA23508; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 23:45:21 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <200001190645.XAA23508@harmony.village.org> To: "Matthew N. Dodd" Subject: Re: Problems with PCMCIA Cards Cc: Edwin Culp , current@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 19 Jan 2000 01:40:15 EST." References: Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 23:45:21 -0700 From: Warner Losh Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message "Matthew N. Dodd" writes: : The pcic driver should be smart enough to find a free IRQ; in addition : pccardd shouldn't have to specify a list of IRQs to use; thats info the : kernel knows about. Should be smart enough? How? There are a limited number of IRQs available on most laptops. There are typically no tables to look these things up in, no plug and play things to ask in modern pcs because we're using compatibility mode from the pci bridge chip. About the best one can do is allocate the irq last and hope that the first free one that is available is actually wired to the bridge chip and can be used. We can augment that with hints that have proven to be good on most laptops, but it is still a crap shoot. At least for cardbus bridges we'll be able to ask the pci bios what is available and use that. : I'm kind of curious to know if the newbus 'rewrite' leans this way. I'm a : little skeptical of 'usbd', and 'pccardd' at this point; the need for : userland event delivery is one thing but at this point it looks like both : of them do nearly the same thing. Matching drivers to hardware is : something a newbus driver should do itself; relying on an external hint : mechanism strikes me as a solution prone to user aggravation. (speaking : as an aggravated user of course.) We agree on this point completely. The only reason to have pccardd in the new world order is to provide a mechanism to run ifconfig when the card is inserted. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message