Re: 2.3 wish: integrate pcmcia into mainstream kernel

Riley Williams (rhw@MemAlpha.CX)
Fri, 4 Jun 1999 02:04:52 +0100 (GMT)


Hi David.

On 3 Jun 1999, david parsons wrote:

...and if you had an email address that was decodable, I'd've replied
direct to you rather than via this list...

>> Another combination that's near enough impossible to install
>> Linux on is a system with one or more EIDE hard drives, but with
>> only SCSI CD drives.

> Huh? That seems very bizarre; I know that some early Slackwares
> really didn't like it when you had a SCSI disk and IDE CD-ROM
> (or visa-versa) and would insist on trying to lilo a boot sector
> onto the CD, but I'd think that that would all be solved by now.

I can't speak for Slackware as the only time I tried one, it told be
that my Intel P166 cpu was an invalid processor, something I didn't
find amusing. Since RedHat 4.1 went on as smooth as silk, I've pretty
much stuck with that since...

> Certainly Mastodon doesn't have any trouble doing this, and it's
> a distribution I do as a hobby (of course I pretty aggressively
> trim away SCSI support <to nothing more than Aha1542,1740,2940
> and friends, BusLogic, NCR810, AMD, and Advansys>, because SCSI
> has become Too Damn Expensive for mere mortals.)

I have to admit that's one distribution I hadn't heard of. Sorry.

> Fitting PCMCIA card services onto the install floppy is, on the
> other hand, a complete nightmare: libc4 + BASIC + the installer
> + insmod + all the pcmcia modules + a diagnostic shell == 10k
> larger than a 1.44 floppy. Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh! A hybrid card
> services stack, where tcic.o, i8<mumble>.o, and pcmcia_core.o
> are built into the kernel, but all the drivers and cs layers are
> left in userspace might solve this problem, at least until the
> next major release bloats up the kernel by 100k :-(

That I can certainly understand.

Best wishes from Riley.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* ftp://ftp.MemAlpha.cx/pub/rhw/Linux
* http://www.MemAlpha.cx/kernel.versions.html

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