Re: New resources - pls, explain :-(

David Hinds (dhinds@zen.stanford.edu)
Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:59:52 -0700


> > And while you don't seem to believe it, there are buses where you
> > CANNOT initialize the device generically. It happens with PCI too,
> > with devices with extended registers etc,
>
> If `extended registers' == `hard-wired legacy ISA compatibility
> stuff', the driver must do everything manually since the generic
> code doesn't know about these ports at all. No enable_device
> function helps in this case.

The generic code could be informed about these things. There is info
about these extended registers in the PnP BIOS.

If anyone is interested, the latest PCMCIA beta (on csb.stanford.edu
in /pub/pcmcia/NEW) has a PnP BIOS subsystem (which hopefully will not
be in PCMCIA permanently) that gives you some tools for looking up and
modifying PnP-BIOS-managed device configurations. I took some of the
low level code written by Keith Owens, gave it a /proc/bus/pnp
interface, and wrote lspnp/setpnp utilities modelled loosely on the
corresponding PCI utilities. It's a little raw (you can mess up your
system by reconfiguring live devices, etc), but it resolved some of my
more thorny resource management troubles.

-- Dave Hinds

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