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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:12222 comp.os.386bsd.misc:3108 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!spool.mu.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles M. Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: BT445C == No FreeBSD??? Date: 09 Aug 1994 15:22:52 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 38 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Aug9112252@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <31vs36$qgv@tekgen.bv.tek.com> <Cu4w68.99B@tfs.com> <DERAADT.94Aug6165915@newt.fsa.ca> <3272h7$9ip@u.cc.utah.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: terry@cs.weber.edu's message of 9 Aug 1994 05:00:23 GMT In article <3272h7$9ip@u.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) writes: Uh, what determines the device order? The 3c509 specification determines the order. I don't have it handy, so I can't give you an exact quote. Specifically, it isn't sorted by port, and it isn't sorted by IRQ (that you can tell, anyway) and it isn't sorted by hardware address (unless it's reverse sorted order)... is it by who replies first? All three of those (as well as the existing approach of not dealing with it) have failure modes. One case where they might all fail is replacing a card, or moving it to a different I/O address or IRQ because you need to add a SCSI card. Currently, you can specific explicit addresses for any of the cards and be guaranteed a specific binding, if that's important for you. The existing mechanism is not a replacement for site-specific or machine-specific configurations; it's mainly intended for generic kernels that can be used for installation on a wide variety of machines. (And I might add that it works quite well for that.) I don't think it's reasonable for the kernel to go out of its way to avoid obvious failure modes, only to create new less-obvious ones. The user is supposed to be intelligent; the kernel is a slave. Be a real bummer to make a mistake. Yah, someone might die! -- - Charles Hannum NetBSD group Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sun4c, mac68k, pc532, da30. In progress: sun3, pmax, vax, sun4m, alpha, sun4.