Date: Sat, 08 Jun 96 14:56:54 PST From: "Brett Glass" <Brett_Glass@ccgate.infoworld.com> To: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> Cc: sef@kithrup.com, questions@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Which dual Pentium motherboard? Cyrix SMP? Message-ID: <9605088342.AA834264287@ccgate.infoworld.com>
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> This makes the card not a _pure_ EISA card. If it has resources on it > that respond to I/O cycles that are not controlled by the EISA > configuration parameters, the card is in violation of the EISA spec. Perhaps true. But of course, given the choice between "purity" and a gazillion or so support calls, we all know which any vendor in his right mind will choose. > Yepp.... it's just not a pretty picture either way you dice it. Remeber, > part of the idea of EISA was to eliminate jumper settings and go to a > soft configure, but everyone seems to have cheated on this one :-(. The problem is that the spec wasn't well thought-out -- in quite a number of ways. There was no way to "bootstrap;" that is, a machine whose floppy controller was not configured to work could not run the configuration program. The configuration programs were also horrors: big, slow, and ugly. And a full set of configuration files couldn't fit on a disk. The bad engineering that went into that software is largely responsible for the failure of EISA. --Brett
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