[Etherboot-developers] Re: etherboot && isa pnp

[Ken Y. <ke...@bi...>]

[Further discussion diverted to developers list.]

>The computer is a tulip 486DX4-100, it's made entirely from laptop-hardware:
>it is very flat, has onboard audio, video and nic, and has pcmcia.
>The networkcard is an AMD lance ne2100 (isa), and has bootrom.
>...
>.000021.0000 loadedROM segment 0x900 length 0x4000 reloc 0x9400
>Boot from (N)etwork of from (L)ocal? N
>Etherboot 5.0.1 (GPL) Tagged ELF for [NE2100]
>Probing...[NE2100]No adapter found<sleep>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>The last line repeats.
>
>The problem is (I think) that it's an isa pnp card; it requires some
>work to get it functioning properly in linux.
>In linux, I have to do the following to use it:
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
># pnpdump > /etc/isapnp.conf
><edit /etc/isapnp.conf, and change the values corresponding to the AMD
>  lance. Irq in the file is 3, I have to change it to 9. DMA is 3 and
>  stays that way. The i/o address is changed from 0x200 to 0x300.>
># isapnp /etc/isapnp.conf
># modprobe lance
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>I looked through etherboots source (main.c, config.c and lance.c), but
>I found nothing I could do to make it work.
>The probes with the 4 default i/o adresses (0x300, 0x320, 0x340, 0x360)
>plain fail, and when I forced the lance_probe1() with i/o = 0x300, it
>would crash on boot.
>I also noticed that the docs say isapnp bios support is lacking
>(which I found out the hard way), but my knowledge of how isa pnp works,
>and thus what is required to use this nic from bootrim, is not adequate.
>
>I was hoping you could tell what the exact problem is, what I can do to
>make it work anyway, or some pointers to where I could get help or more
>information on isa pnp.

I honestly don't know what's invoved in ISA PnP support. I think it
requires structures in the ROM header similar to PCI PnP support, but
I haven't seen any docs on it, maybe you could do a search on the net.
Then of course for floppy booting you'd need to somehow hook into what
the BIOS discovered. Good luck.