Re: Workaround for some broken BIOSes that forgot to enableATAchannels [patch]

It seems Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> > > This is BIOS on my new vprMatrix 175B4 notebook (P4M-1.7GHz).
> > > Along with ATA, it "forgets" to enable ports on network card
> > > (fxp driver), I've already committed patch for it. Funny thing
> > > is that the problem doesn't exists on 4.7 - both ata and fxp
> > > work here OOB. This might be somehow related to ACPI, but
> > > forcefully disabling it in 5-CURRENT doesn't help.
> > 
> > I heard BIOSes, and now its just one :)
> > 
> > I'll wait and see if there is more of this, before committing code that
> > might be just a one off...
> 
> :(((
> 
> I am really wonder why ata driver is so strict in this area.
> Many other drivers don't rely on BIOS to do the right job and
> enable ports, memory space and busmastering explicitly. And
> this is the right thing (IMO), since most modern operating
> systems including FreeBSD don't give a shit to BIOS settings
> anyway. If device is probed and user didn't disable the driver
> explicitly, it should do everything to attach to device, no
> matter in which weird state the BIOS left it.

The current way of things are implemented because:
1. Users wanted our driver to honor the BIOS setting an ATA channel on or off

2. If the BIOS doesn't enable the port, it most likely hasn't setup 
   interrupt routing etc as well..

So as long as this is a problem on 1 machine only, the hack is best 
kept in your local tree.
Now if this shows up on a significant amount of machines, I'll think
about a way to deal with this.

-Søren