Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 23:35:36 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu> To: Ray Black <allah@mercury.webserve.net> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hardware Support Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980523233233.9142P-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980520191548.13863A-100000@mercury.webserve.net>
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On Wed, 20 May 1998, Ray Black wrote: > I've got one of the dread Compaq Prosignia VS servers with the unsupported > NCR 53c710 Fast-SCSI-2 controller integrated with the EISA bus. Why > is this board not supported? I mean, it's not as though it were an > extremely rare computer, so what are the hardware problems that cause no > one in the BSD (or even the Linux) community to support it? My guesses are as follows: . Those who are capable of programming for this card don't have a card handy to hack with. . Until recently Compaq products were lameducks because their Ethernet cards weren't supported either. Now that there is a driver for their NICs it may spur someone to undertake a development effor. > I'm far from a > great programmer, but if someone would point me to info on how to write > device drivers, I'd do what I could to make that sucker work. NCR/Symbios are pretty outgoing with specs, see http://www.symbios.com. Symbios is the SCSI subsidiary of NCR that was spun off of NCR/AT&T. > Also, on a silimar note, it would seem like something that could be ported > over from SCO fairly easily (and I'm no trademark or copyright lawyer, so > I don't know the ramifications of that), yet it's not been done. What > would be the limitations of that move, beyond the legal ones? SCO is *completely* different from FreeBSD. Porting from SCO (esp. device drivers) isn't as easy as it looks. SCO is SVR4 based while we are 4.4BSD based -- it's the difference between Chevy and BMW. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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