Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 01:16:29 -0800 From: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@ipinc.net> To: "'Sheldon Hearn'" <sheldonh@uunet.co.za> Cc: "freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: i386/2598: ep0 in eisa mode hangs if ep0-device (isa) is enabled Message-ID: <01BF8E1C.18828A60.tedm@ipinc.net>
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Your welcome, I try to get in to the database from time to time and do what I can to clarify the more oddball PR's. I don't like telling people not to do something that is not explicitly prohibited in the documentation. Also, I feel that responses like "your doing it wrong" to a bug report are most likely to get the submitter to think "well screw you too" and I'd rather people feel that someone was actually looking at their problem and considering it and attempting to help. We want them using GNATS instead of posting to Usenet where there is no trackability, and if they feel that unless their rocket scientists that their bugs will be ignored, they won't use GNATS. With this particular bug I figured the submitter put it in both because of pride of accomplishment (Hey, look at me I found a bug) as much as a desire to inform the public. Who knows in this case maybe the original author intended the ep driver to gracefully handle this condition. I have used these cards extensively in all modes and I know all about them, my explanation was merely an attempt to clarify the situation for the casual reader. It's really up to whomever is responsible for the ep driver to decide how to respond to the original PR and I hadn't seen a response. I know that often these drivers become unsupported when the original author moves on and nobody picks up the driver. I would guess that few developers doing any work on ep at this time have access to an EISA box let alone a 3c579 card, and it's most likely that this bug will never get addressed, since ep seems to be used more for pcmcia cards and other cards than EISA 3c579 cards. So, failing anyone stepping forward I figured that this is probably better served by simply explicitly prohibiting the condition in the documentation, rather than mucking with the driver itself, since chances are remote the driver will ever get mucked with! There is presidence for this - for example the Buslogic 742a card will be detected first by the EISA probe then later by the ISA probe which will spit out lots of error messages, the solution with that is the same, disable the ISA bt probe. We do say in the readmes to disable all probes for cards not in the machine but we don't say exactly why to do it, nor give examples, thus it's human nature to figure that disabling probes is not that important. We also say that eisa cards are probed and there is one place somewhere that we do say to disable the isa probe on a dual-use driver, but it's buried, and certainly not referenced in the man page for ep. So the submitter certainly has a point - we didn't explicitly tell him to not do it, so why should we say it's his fault when he does it? That's also why I made the doc change recommendation. Ted -----Original Message----- From: Sheldon Hearn [SMTP:sheldonh@uunet.co.za] Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 12:40 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: i386/2598: ep0 in eisa mode hangs if ep0-device (isa) is enabled On Tue, 14 Mar 2000 17:50:02 PST, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > I'd recommend this be a documentation change on the ep manual page, > and in the hardware.txt, and FAQ, rather than a driver code change. First, let me say thank you for the work you're doing with helping out in the PR database! :-) My take on your explanation ofthis problem is that the simple solution is to simply refrain from configuring the card for EISA mode. Is it that simple? Ciao, Sheldon. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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