Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 17:02:48 +0100 (CET) From: Volker.Wiegand@t-online.de (Volker Wiegand) To: FreeBSD Questions Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Cc: heinrich.hiemesch@online.de, matthew@starbreaker.net Subject: Revisited: PCI parallel port adapters Message-ID: <1016726249.3c9a02e98beb3@webmail.t-online.de>
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Hi, I have recently purchased a low cost PCI parallel port adapter. Since it was advertised as "Linux compatible" I assumed it would also run under FreeBSD. Stupid me :-) And looking into the FreeBSD-Question archives, I found that I am not the only one. So here is the current state of my "investigation" - maybe it helps to understand and to fix. We all seem to have a NetMos based card; they are obviously a major supplier. Vendor ID is 0x9710; device ID 0x9805 is a common one (see http://www.netmos.com/Nm9805.pdf for the data sheet of the respective device). From what I understand looking at the FreeBSD sources, there is currently a silent assumption that all "ppc" devices (which would be the basic hardware driver layer) are ISA based. And since FreeBSD is based on a "bus oriented hardware architecture" as opposed to the "simple device addresses" used in Linux (this is my wording, please don't flame me :-) these cards work under Linux, but not (yet) under FreeBSD. Well, they would work, but they are not "found". IMHO, the solution should be to migrate the sys/isa/ppc.c driver code into a sys/dev/ppc/ subdirectory (I suspect that the "sio" serial port driver has made a similar metamorphosis when going PCI) and split it up into common and bus oriented parts. It might even be reasonable to include their serial ports also while we are at it, by the way. Now, I don't know who is the right person to suggest this to? Maintainer, are you online? :-))) Am I on the right track? Is somebody already working on this? If not, how can I find out whether the maintainer would consider doing it or accepting a patch (I believe I would be able to provide that patch, but only if I am not stepping on anyone's toes :-) Kind regards (this is my very first FreeBSD posting :-) Volker To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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