Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 06:11:32 +0200 (MET DST) From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> To: jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org (Jamil J. Weatherbee) Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Diskless Workstation -- Problems needing to be addressed Message-ID: <199709240411.GAA20679@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970923124546.177A-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org> from "Jamil J. Weatherbee" at Sep 23, 97 12:47:41 pm
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> Last time I called Linksys they were reluctantly willing to give me some > unusual info about the NE2000 cards we have, and possibly I could buy a > boot rom off them and take a look at it :>) my experience on this: I looked at a boot rom for some other PCI ne200 clone. They only had code for novell, and internally the rom looked much different from what "PCI system architecture" says... My experience is that some BIOSes work fine with a normal ISA boot rom such as the one produced by netboot, and others (presumably old ones) seem not to like boot roms on PCI cards (the same card+rom on another system works fine) even if build the way PCI system architecture says. So my advice is to try the standard rom first... As a quick and dirty alternative, since I have some broken ISA network cards, at times I put there the card with the only purpose of acting as a boot rom socket. One more advanced option could be to update the flash bios to include the boot room, but this is a bit risky... As for 100 Mbit/s cards, remember they are quite different from ne2000, and that you will probably have to import a lot of code the controller (DEC 21x4x ?) they use. Unfortunately you cannot just link in say if_de.c , probably a lot of hand editing would be necessary (and a copy of the controller's data sheets). Luckily PCI cards tend to have only one chip so if you have those docs (often available from the manufacturer, e.g. www.dec.com or www.intel.com) you are in good shape... Cheers Luigi -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ _____________________________|______________________________________
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