From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 3 07:24:39 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id HAA13609 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 07:24:39 -0800 (PST) Received: from sl-007.sl.cybercomm.net (sl-007.sl.cybercomm.net [199.171.196.135]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id HAA13590 for ; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 07:24:28 -0800 (PST) Received: from sl-007.sl.cybercomm.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by sl-007.sl.cybercomm.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id KAA03864; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 10:24:16 -0500 Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 10:24:14 -0500 (EST) From: Sujal Patel X-Sender: smpatel@sl-000.sl.cybercomm.net To: Poul-Henning Kamp cc: "FreeBSD Hacker's list" Subject: Re: FreeDetect & Plug n Play In-Reply-To: <1142.820668770@critter.tfs.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk On Wed, 3 Jan 1996, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > > > Is anyone looking into Plug&Play? > > > > That will be nice, though I daresay that it's the ISA devices we'll > > be having the most fun with. > > There actually is a P&P for ISA, where the motherboard completely disables > all but one slot, so you know what you found where. I have two PnP ISA Cards that do just this. It's really annoying initializing these cards in DOS everytime I reboot. I've got some code written, enough to detect the cards, isolate each one, and dump resource data.. Hopefully, this week I'll be able to at least get code to hardwire the cards down to a specfic IRQ, DMA, IOPORT... The interesting task will trying to use PnP cards as they were intended (to configure themselves automatically). As far as I can tell, the DOS configuration manager uses these criteria to determine what resources to assign to what cards. 1: Consult EISA-bios configuration information (if this system is EISA). 2: Consult configuration written by Intel's ICU program. 3: For IO-Ports, conflict detection/resolution seems to be part of Intel's PnP specification. 4: Of course, remember what resouces you assign other PnP cards, and don't conflict with those cards. The question is, what does the DOS configuration manager do with computers that have PnP-Bios (I guess these are mostly PCI systems). Also, how would FreeBSD handle initializing PnP ISA cards. One way would be to probe all non-PnP devices first, and then use what resources are left over- but this seems like it would get pretty ugly. You could also just hardwire PnP cards down to specific resources in the kernel config- but this isn't really "Plug-n-Play". OR you could do what the DOS configuration manager does, but that seems like a lot of work. Sujal