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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: my bug list
Message-ID: <1993Mar15.223046.10278@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <1993Feb27.235240.7476@coe.montana.edu> <1mpdb0INNo8a@ftp.UU.NET> <DERAADT.93Mar11154207@newt.fsa.ca>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 93 22:30:46 GMT
Lines: 61
In article <DERAADT.93Mar11154207@newt.fsa.ca> deraadt@fsa.ca (Theo de Raadt) writes:
>nate@cs.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>>They do things that Berkeley Unix avoids.
>
>In article <1mpdb0INNo8a@ftp.UU.NET> sef@Kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
>> Since all commercial unices, as well as Linux, manage to work around this,
>> the thing that they do, that Berkeley Unix avoids, must be "working
>> correctly."
>
>It's unbelievable how often this comes up.
>
>Normal Berkeley Unix resets the entire world when it comes up.
>
>386BSD is broken because it does NOT.
>
>The device configuration architecture in 386BSD is very weak compared to
>normal Berkeley Unix.
I think you'll find that the majority of the problem here is the PC bus
architecture being device-indeterminate. THere is no mechanism whereby I
can ask a device "what are you?". This is distictly different from most
of the bus architectures out there today (like VME/BI/QBUS/FutureBus/SBUS/
etc.).
Don't blame "poorly written" probe routines for the fact that device ID
is a royal bitch on PC bus machines.
Other than the WD setup code from WD itself and some of the OnTrack disk
utilities for particular disk manufacturers (IDE/ESDI/RLL/MFM *only*!),
I don't know of any real device identification which takes place on PC's
or is even possible.
You have a garage that can hold 8 cars and has a mass detector where the
engines might be. You can get that there's something on a particular
IRQ, but identifying what it is or which memory range is associated
with which device depends on having a default configuration. Just because
there's mass (memory) at a particular location doesn't mean you've correctly
identified what car is parked there.
Look at the WD8013 patches (500, 502, 503) for recognition of WD8013 boards
that fail the ROM checksum. The probe returns "true" if the memory is at
the expected loaction. Without the patches, the checksum has to match;
other than this, there's no way of identifying *from the hardware* where
the board lives or what it does -- there's no hardware inventory.
If you think you can figure out a way to do a real hardware inventory on a
PC, tell us about it -- or make the million yourself. 8-).
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
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