as long as you think that adding more "unneeded" instructions might cause
problems and lockups for others, I'm happy to specify IRQ in startup
(but if there would be a save way for everyone getting _my_ card
th be detected automatically, well then... ;-)
On Sep 08, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 11:33:44 +0200
> From: Harald Koenig <koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de>
>
> and I don't like having to hard wire IRQs in startup scripts if possible
> (the IRQ for this card changed quite some times in the last years because
> of conflicts with other hardware, depending on configuration),
> that reminds me too much for stupid CONFIG.SYS :-(
>
> The problem is that IRQ probing on ISA bus cards is a real kludge,
> because it's not something for which the ISA or ISA cards are really
> designed to handle.
>
> So getting something which works really is a "catch as catch can" type
> situation. Etienne Lorrain, who originally redid the IRQ probing
> routine, removed a lot of what he thought was unneeded crap from the
> IRQ probing routines. And if you simply look at the paper specs, and
> how a reasonable person might expect the ISA and ISA bus cards and
> UART-clone chips to work, they would indeed by unnecessary.
>
> I put back some of the "unneeded" instructures over his objections so
> that it would work on more hardware cards, but AST Fourports are no
> longer on my development machine (they are on my 386 box which isn't
> particularly swift at doing compiles).
>
> In some cases, however, adding some of these "unneeded" instructions
> have also caused some people's systems to lock up or fail during the
> autodetection process. So as we try to make the driver work for some
> systems, we may end up making it fail for other people's systems.
>
> This is one of the reasons why I'm not particularly thrilled about
> promising any more functionality in the automatic IRQ detection, and why
> I strongly encourage people to hard-code the IRQ's in the setup file. I
> know that its inconvenient, but that's the nature of the ISA hardware
> that we have to work with.
>
> - Ted
>
> P.S. There's a similar issue with the 16750 autodetection code and some
> badly-done no-name UART built into an internal modem. I got one
> complaint from someone who has one of these cheap internal modems which
> was correctly detected in the Linux 2.0 kernel, but in the Linux 2.1
> kernel, it is falsely detected as a 16750. Unfortunately, there's not
> much I can do about things like this except to tell people to have the
> boot scripts run the setserial command to hardcode the UART. I at least
> have a specification sheet for the 16750; I don't have a spec sheet for
> this no-name modem. Trying to correctly autodetect all of the
> incompatible, cheap'n'cheasy hardware out there is a pretty much
> impossible task.
Harald
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