Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 11:20:44 +1000 From: Gregory Bond <gnb@itga.com.au> To: stable@freebsd.org, bugs@freebsd.org, davidn@freebsd.org Subject: Whence Stallion support for -Stable? Message-ID: <200106280120.LAA14713@lightning.itga.com.au>
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[Cc'd to stable and bugs. Please reply to bugs only] The driver for Stallion multiport cards in 4-Stable is quite old. It doesn't support many of the newer cards, in particular the EasyIO-PCI card, nor any card manufactured since about 1998, which have a newer and unsupported UART chip. The driver in -Current is much the same with a few current-isms, afaict. There is a newer driver in the unsupported section of the stallion FTP site: ftp://ftp.stallion.com/drivers/unsupported/FreeBSD/stalbsd-2.0.0.tar.gz This supports all the new hardware but seems to be written for old (3.x-vintage) kernels, because it doesn't go anywhere near compiling under 4-Stable. There is a PR (http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=22967) submitted by Jan L. Peterson <jlp@flipdog.com> which gives a new version of the above driver that does compile with 4-Stable, and seems to operate as expected (tho I haven't explored all the corner cases with flow control, modem control etc). But this PR is less than ideal. It contains a link to the new driver (fortunately still valid!) rather than the data itself, it requires bits from the original Stallion tarball, and doesn't update MAKEDEV or man pages. And the driver was written for 4.1.1 and will need updating for a few things that have changed since then (kqueue). It also "is using old-style compatibility shims" (whatever that means). This PR has been untouched since it was submitted 12 months ago. A related PR from the same period (http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=19890) has been assigned to davidn but also remains otherwise untouched. I am willing (and I hope able!) to provide a jumbo patch to tie all these pieces together and update this driver in a manner that should be easy for a comitter to commit to -Stable. But I am running -Stable only, and have no experience in porting device drivers to -Current, and cannot test this driver in -Current. Is it worth me putting together such a comprehensive patch, or will the need to run it in -Current first mean my effort would be wasted? Any device writer / committer gurus care to offer some guidance? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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