Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 18:23:32 +1100 From: John Saunders <john.saunders@scitec.com.au> To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hi Message-ID: <3510C7F4.78079D64@scitec.com.au> References: <Pine.WNT.3.95.980318221534.-8793C-100000@greymouser.circle-path.org> <19980319173348.15569@welearn.com.au>
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Sue Blake wrote:
> > I've looked over Freebsd.org again and again, and have yet to find
> > something like this. Being of that type that seems to be eternally poor,
> > *grin* certain pieces of my hardware are stripped from where I could get
> > them, for instance, an old 3-com Etherlink II card. It took me over four
> > hours to figure out that I needed to do a custom installtion because
> > FreeBSD was looking for the card on IRQ5, not IRQ9. It would help a bit,
> > as I don't like to bug Rod over trivial stuff like that. :)
That seems to be a common problem with the PC architecture. With the
PCI and PnP ISA cards all this stuff can be determined automatically.
However legacy ISA cards will still be an unknown quantity for the OS.
For for most operating systems, having knowledge of the settings on
non-PnP cards is critical to installing OK. And for operating systems
that don't fully support PnP you need even more knowledge. Unless
of course you have a plain standard system (no ethernet, no sound,
no SCSI).
There are some tricks an OS can do like probing that can be done.
However there are gotchas with probes for one device clobbering
another device. Windows 95 SETUP specifically detects if it gets
reset during a probe so it knows the 2nd time around to skip that
probe.
I hope that FreeBSD will get some decent PnP support in the near future.
Cheers.
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