In message: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Devon H. O'Dell " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: : On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 03:55:53PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote: : > > I'm busy writing a Ziatech 5503 watchdog driver for FreeBSD (and : > > porting all the watchdog stuff to DragonFly BSD) and Plan 9. For my : > > driver, I have no way to identify that the system has the driver, so : > > I wanted to make it conditional on : : Rather, I have no way to identify that the system has the device :). : : > > options ZT5503 : > : > That's not a good enough reason to make it an option, it should really : > be a device. Users that want it can add it to their kernel config. : > In fact, they'd have to add it either way, so why make it weird for : > them. : > : > Put this device on the ISA bus, give it an identify routine that : > always adds it (this isn't GENERIC safe, but since there's no way to : > know the device is there, you are stuck with that). : : OK. I don't know a hell of a lot about how the ISA bus works, though : I suppose that I remember that things using the old SB 16 cards : (Wolfenstein, anyone?) would simply probe various I/O ports.
:-) Yes. Usually one does try to probe for things, but the devices must be cooperative. : Unfortunately, in my case, there are really no board specific I/O : registers that will give me information I can detect (or so it seems : from the manufacturer's manuals), though I am going to write a : couple of tests today to read some of these registers and see if : there is any useful information contained within them which I : might use to probe. Right. That's too bad, but with somehardware that's what you get. : Assuming no useful information exists, is it enough to let the : device attach regardless if the user has : : device zt5503 : : in the configuration file? Maxime suggested that I use device hints : to gather the port and such. Where should I put these hints? NOTES? /boot/device.hints and also NOTES. : If I understand correctly, to hook this up into the build, I will : still have a line in files which will look something like: : : dev/ziatech/zt5503.c optional zt5503 Yes. : Hm, Ziatech is now Performance Technologies. Should that perhaps be : dev/pt then instead? We generally don't have directories for manufacturers. : Thanks for the help! No problem. Warner _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"