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Date:      Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:54:43 -0700
From:      David Greenman <davidg@root.com>
To:        Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Cc:        dawes@rf900.physics.usyd.edu.au, SimsS@Infi.Net, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Some recent changes to GENERIC 
Message-ID:  <199607101554.IAA04210@root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Jul 1996 10:41:34 CDT." <199607101541.KAA25663@brasil.moneng.mei.com> 

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>> >>(For my benefit, can anyone explain why the default port address for ed0
>> >>is 0x280?  I assume some historical reason, but I really don't know the
>> >>details....)
>> >
>> >It is a common default for WD/SMC cards, which also use the ed driver.
>> 
>>    So is 0x300. There's even a hard jumper to select it, and I think the
>> WD/SMC cards are even set to 0x300 out of the box.
>
>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.

>>    Erm, why? 0x300 is a better default.
>
>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.

>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.

>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. 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! :-)

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project



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