Re: New bus-unit wiring via hints..

Wise men talk because they have something to say, however on Sun,
Oct 28, 2007 at 08:16 , freebsd-current-request_at_freebsd.org just
had to say something so we heard:

> Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 20:53:21 +0200
> From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013_at_student.uu.se>
> Subject: Re: New-bus unit wiring via hints..

> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 10:58:56AM -0700, John-Mark Gurney
> wrote:

> > Marcel Moolenaar wrote this message on Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at
> > 10:48 -0700:

> > > On Oct 27, 2007, at 10:42 AM, John-Mark Gurney wrote:

> > > >I believe that the hints is the correct thing, Marcel never
> > > >answered how to ensure ACPI kept sio0 as COM1,

> > > I did answer that. You obvious did not read or understand a
> > > I word was saying...

> > Yeh, you're solution was to simply declare that anyone who
> > knows that COM1 is at 0x3f8 is wrong, and to use a different,
> > yet again arbitrary solution which is which is listed first in
> > ACPI...

> > To quote you: More legacy PC fixation. If the BIOS claims that
> > COM1 is at 0x2f8 then so be it. If COM2 is enumerated first
> > and it ends up as uart0 then so be it. There's no bug. It's
> > all in a name. Device wiring would allow people to tie COM2
> > to uart1 if they want to, but all this COM-stuff is really
> > nothing more than a fixation on 20-year old conventions that
> > the rest of the world abandoned many years ago. It's turned
> > into a bigger problem than it really is, mostly because we
> > still have those stupid hints that are based on 20-year old
> > conventions.

> > So, if one ACPI implementation puts _UID = 0 at 0x3f8, but
> > lists it after _UID = 1 at 0x2f8, that it's fine for sio0 to
> > be _UID = 1? I'm fine w/ that... Just as long as we ship a
> > hints file to keep us old farts sane...

> Yup. If I in the BIOS setup screen tells the BIOS that the first
> serial port should be at 0x3f8, and the second serial port
> should be at 0x2f8, then it is very annoying if FreeBSD attaches
> sio0 to the serial port at 0x2f8 and sio1 to the port at 0x3f8
> - the opposite of what I wanted. (This is not a hypothetical
> example, by the way.)

Hmm.  I started running Xenix systems on Intel systems [SCO's
Xenix, and Altos systems] back in the 1984 era.

At that time as I recall it the BIOS was ONLY used to get
the information to boot the system, and everything else in the BIOS
was ignored.  This caused a lot of confusion for people who had
come from a DOS oriented world and saying things such as "well it
works in DOS so *i*x must be broken.

So - have things changed where the OS looks at the BIOS [in the
*i*x world - or is it like this old fart remembers where BIOS was
only used to find the HD and boot the OS?

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv _at_ wjv . com