Re: [Etherboot-developers] last call for 5.0.7 check-ins

[Eric W B. <ebi...@ln...>]

"Timothy Legge" <tl...@ro...> writes:

> > Timothy, does it hurt if ISA_PNP is always defined when compiling
> > 3c515.c? I.e. are BIOS detection and driver detection mutually
> > exclusive? If not you could add it to 3C515FLAGS and it will be used
> > when compiling that file. If yes, perhaps in 5.0.8, the code could check
> > if BIOS detection has been done and if not, do its own detection.
> 
> I will look into it, but it won't be until next week.  I suspect that I can
> do something to make it work without the define.  However, ISA_PNP is not
> supposed to be used if the PC's BIOS already enabled the card.

There are two cases of interest here.  
Using ISA_PNP to detect the card, but not set it's resources
  (because the BIOS already has).
Setting the resources on a card that the BIOS neglected, to handle. 

Unless I have missed a detail ISA_PNP for detection should always work.

Allocating I/O ports on the fly is a very interesting exercise, because
you have to avoid everything that has already been allocated.  Which
in a primarily ISA system can be a challenge to figure out.  

The same problem can theoretically also affect PCI devices so the
solution needn't be PNP_ISA specific.  Say something like.
-DALLOCATE_RESOURCES
And we compile in a resource allocator that does it's best to come up
with a non-conflicting device address if the device doesn't have
resources allocated to it.

A card specific hack that assigns some hard coded I/O address may
be smaller and more manageable.  Especially if we disable the device
and remove the resource allocations when we are done with it.

Eric