Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 11:15:54 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: davidg@root.com Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some recent changes to GENERIC Message-ID: <199607101615.LAA25737@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199607101554.IAA04210@root.com> from "David Greenman" at Jul 10, 96 08:54:43 am
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> >There is a hard jumper to select 0x300 on SOME cards, on others I believe it > >is 0x280. The jumper settings are an ugly mishmash, trust me, I used to > >like jumper settable cards but with SMC changing the settings every other > >revision of card, it rapidly becomes a stinking pile of doo doo. > > I'm not advocating that people use the jumpers. I'm mearly pointing out > that they exist. Yeah, that's about where I am these days too. > >Actually, I would really like to see ed1 stay. The ed driver, in my > >opinion, is by far the most popular Ethernet driver, and having two > >interfaces available makes it very easy to rapidly do things like toss > >a second network interface in a machine, build an "emergency router", etc. > >without the downtime required to rebuild a kernel on a 386DX/40 with 8MB of > >RAM (which takes a LONG time). > > What's wrong with using -c at the Boot: prompt? Rebuilding the kernel is > certainly not necessary to get the change in an "emergency" situation. Uh, if you REMOVE the "ed1" device, by definition you lose the ability to do the things I mentioned above because you have REMOVED your second interface. Unless -c now allows you to create new instances of devices for which drivers are available (that would be too cool and I would be the first to kiss the feet of the person who did it). > >However, I will definitely scream if anyone removes sio2/sio3. Disabled by > >default, MAYBE. Removed, NO. I have seen far too many people who have > >three or four STANDARD SERIAL PORTS and sio2/3 directly map to COM3/4. > >There should be NO reason to screw around with this. These lines support > >standard PC hardware. If you remove them, remove sio1 too because you > >obviously only need one serial port to do an install. > > We have no mechanism in -stable to disable devices by default. "COM3" and > "COM4" aren't 'standard', either. For one thing, the interrupt selections > for these are often switched. In my mind, "standard" is a situation that exists when I can go up to your average piece of PC hardware and reasonably expect that I might be able to do something. All serial cards I've seen in the last few years support all four COM ports, and the vast majority seem to allow setting of the interrupt too. As much as this may be an "undocumented" standard, and there may be some vagueness about the interrupts that should be used, I contend that a standard exists. > >I fail to see what dropping sio2/sio3/ed1 buys anyways, since these device > >drivers are already required by sio0/sio1/ed0. I assume it might save a FEW > >bytes in kernel size for the extra entries. BIG stinkin' deal. That's a > >small price to pay for making it work the way people would expect. > > We have to remove sio3 because we can't disable it by default and it > conflicts with the most common SVGA cards. That's a plausible argument but I remind you that we've been through several releases with sio3 enabled. > The only other option is to bring > in the necessary changes to config(8) to allow "disable". Considering that > we're in code freeze and about 3 days from a release, this seems just a little > but crazy to me...but hey, I aim to please! :-) Then the question I have is this: if we are three days from a release, why are we making last minute UNNECESSARY changes of ANY sort? We have lived through several releases and MANY snap's, etc with the current situation. Now we propose (potentially) MAJOR changes in available default behaviour of the system's kernel, and we intend to implement it three days before a RELEASE, without any SNAP's? In my mind, that is baaaaaaaaaad. What is the difference between making a code change and making a functionality change three days before a release? Maybe I'm missing something. But it's been a long week so far. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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