Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 15:40:16 -0600 (MDT) From: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> To: BRETT_GLASS@ccgate.infoworld.com Cc: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: PCMCIA, APM, 3C562 Message-ID: <199609172140.PAA03719@rocky.mt.sri.com> In-Reply-To: <9608168429.AA842902427@ccgate.infoworld.com> References: <9608168429.AA842902427@ccgate.infoworld.com>
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[ Moved to -mobile ] > Have given up on OS/2 for my laptop.... It seems to be crashing and failing > big-time under the Merlin gamma, and my bug reports have been utterly > ignored. So, I'd like to try FreeBSD on it. But first, some questions: > > How good is the PCMCIA support in FreeBSD? Will I be able to swap cards? Pretty good, but not great. For a Unix, it's as good as almost every other one out on the market. (Better than SCO, better than Unixware, almost as good as Linux, and a bit worse than Solaris x86 which has pretty good support. > Is APM supported? Most newer laptops work pretty well. Some still have problems though, but I'm working on those. APM has been my baby (and thorn in the flesh), and I'm hoping to make it better in the very near future using some code from John Kohl I just got. > Will the system (including PCMCIA) be able to survive a > suspend/resume cycle without "freaking out" or getting too busy to use due > to missed items in /etc/crontab? Not a problem. On my laptops (I use various ThinkPad and NEC Versa for development and testing) suspend/resume works 'most of the time'. I haven't taken the time to look more into things this summer due to other committments, but I hope to ramp back up again pretty quick on things. As far as cron goes, it'll do all the old cron jobs when it comes up (or at least it's supposed to.) If you're worried about old cron jobs getting queued up, either disable cron or don't leave your laptop suspended for more than 48 hours. :) > (Come to think of it, how DOES it handle > missed items in /etc/crontab?) See above. > Is there a sync on suspend? If the battery > dies during a suspend (common on many laptops that suspend when the > battery gets low), is the filesystem left "clean" and ready for a reboot? The above could be done, but aren't right now. Because 'suspend' means "I'll be back", you don't want it to go into single user mode. I'm not sure if we do a 'sync', but we certainly should. I can't check right now as we just moved offices and all our FreeBSD boxes except the router are off the network until we get it wired 'for real'. > Finally, there doesn't appear to be a driver for my 3C562 Modem/Ethernet > combo card. As I understand it, this card is really just a 3Com Ethernet > adapter and a modem (with standard UART) sharing an IRQ. Is there a driver > available? No, and I don't think you'll find one very soon. The support for 'sharing' interrupts doesn't work very well (at all?) right now, and given the task of making the existing code work better I don't see it happening anytime soon. However, the Nomad's may be working on getting a driver for it, but if/when that'll happen only they know. [ The Nomad's are a group of Japanese SW developers who have been doing most of the new PCCARD development for the past 9 months. ] Nate
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