*BSD News Article 61185


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From: yue@heron.Stanford.EDU (Kenneth C. Yue)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: Re: Help! NetBSD doesn't recognize my ethernet card!
Date: 11 Feb 1996 21:54:50 GMT
Organization: Stanford University: Computer Science Department, CA USA
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <4floja$t6j@Radon.Stanford.EDU>
References: <4fj0no$dac@Radon.Stanford.EDU> <4fkjvp$c7f@carol.fwi.uva.nl> <4fll8g$btc@sundog.tiac.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: heron.stanford.edu

In article <4fll8g$btc@sundog.tiac.net>,
Rick Kelly <rmk@tencats.rmkhome.com> wrote:
>Frank van der Linden (frank@fwi.uva.nl) wrote:
>: yue@heron.Stanford.EDU (Kenneth C. Yue) writes:
>: >I bought a new NE2000 compatible ISA ethernet card to run NetBSD 1.1.
>: >NetBSD itself was installed fine, but it just doesn't recognize the
>: >ethernet card.  According to the installation note, if a NE2000
>: >compatible card (ed0) is configured to use I/O address 0x280, IRQ 2
>: >and memory address 0xd000, it'll be recognized, but 0x280 isn't one of
>: >the available I/O addresses on my card (only 0x300, 0x320, 0x340, and
>: >0x360), so how do I ask NetBSD to use the default 0x300 on my card?
>
>: The default installation kernels recognize your family of ethernet cards
>: at the following addresses:
>
>: ed0	at isa? port 0x280 iomem 0xd0000 irq 9	# WD/SMC, 3C503, and NE[12]000
>: ed1	at isa? port 0x250 iomem 0xd8000 irq 9	#   ethernet cards
>: ed2	at isa? port 0x300 iomem 0xcc000 irq 10
>
>: So it looks like picking the values in the last line should work for you.
>
>On my i386 NetBSD boxes I just changed the ed0 line to match the settings
>of the card, and then rebuilt the kernel.  Works like a champ.

Huh?  Are these parameters hard-coded into the kernel?  Why?  Except
for the hard drive parameters (for an obvious reason), shouldn't all
these hardware parameters be stored in a configuration file, and
NetBSD looks at this file when it boots?  If such a file doesn't
exist, or if the data in it are invalid, fine, just use the defaults.
If all these parameters are really hard-coded into the kernel, how do
I rebuilt the kernel?  Don't tell me I need the sources, as I'll have
to scramble to find some floppy disks and carefully putting all the
different distribution sets on them, like what I did with the binary
distributions, because I can't transfer the sources directly into the
hard drive without an ethernet connection!

Sorry if I sound mean, but this is really a brain-dead design if these
parameters are hard-coded into the kernel.

Ken