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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!newsfeeds.sol.net!europa.clark.net!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.bayarea.net!baygate.bayarea.net!thorpej From: thorpej@baygate.bayarea.net (Jason R. Thorpe) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.announce Subject: README: New bus dma framework committed to NetBSD-current Date: 7 Jun 1997 00:58:23 GMT Organization: Numerical Aerospace Simulation Facility - NASA Ames Res. Ctr. Lines: 88 Approved: netbsd-announce-newsgroup@mail.netbsd.org Message-ID: <5nabnf$qfb$1@news.bayarea.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: baygate.bayarea.net Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.announce:449 Hi folks, You may have noticed a flurry of activity lately, and especially today, on the thorpej-bus-dma branch of the source tree. Well, today that code was pulled down into the public NetBSD-current sources. This has been _several_ months of very hard work... I have been working on the API spec since last year, and actively coding on the project since mid-Februrary. There were many issues to consider in the design and implementation of the subsystem, and I must say, I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I am not aware of any other free OS that has done anything like this before, and very few, if any, commercial OSes have done it to this scale, if at all. Anyhow, here is what this means to you: ----- i386 users ----- There is now COMPLETE support for ISA bounce buffers on Adaptec, BusLogic, and UltraStor SCSI controllers! If you have one of these controllers, you will now be able to install > 16M of RAM in your system! Yes, about time, for sure. But, this is the "proper way" to do it that has been talked about on the mailing lists all this time. ----- alpha users ----- There is now support for SGMAP-mapped DMA! This means a couple of things: (a) DMA (mostly) works on the ISA bus. This has been tested with an Adaptec 1542 in an Alpha AXPpci33 (thanks, Curt!) (b) This paves the way for using > 1G of RAM on the AlphaServer 8200/8400. (This is of interest to all you people running NetBSD on your TurboLasers out there! :-) Now, for the caveat... While ISA DMA is basically working on the Alpha, there is a slight problem I'm still trying to find... After some time, an unexpected machine check occurs. I'm working with Curt right now to find the problem, and will address it ASAP. However, no "known working" drivers on the Alpha are affected by this change. After discussing it with Chris Demetriou (the Alpha portmaster), it was decided that pulling the code down now would be OK, and allows i386 users to take advantage of everthing that it gains over there. I will make another announcement to port-alpha when the bugs are ironed out. ------- I would like to take this opportunity to thank the people who helped test and debug the code: Juergen Hannken-Illjes Manuel Bouyer Bill Sommerfeld Michael VanLoon John F. Woods Tracy J. Di Marco White Brian Hechinger Scott Reynolds Dave Burgess Matthias Drochner Curt Sampson Enami Tsugutomo Without their help, this task would have been MUCH harder. Because of these folks, this code is fairly well-tested. They risked file-system life-and-limb, and deserve a round of applause. Thanks, folks! Now, even though this has been well-tested, that doesn't mean that there aren't bugs. With that in mind, if you encounter any problems, PLEASE GATHER AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN, and submit a bug report using send-pr(1). I will address it ASAP. I simply cannot emphasize enough how important lots of details are. Please include as many as you can. Ok, enough of the long-windedness... It's Friday evening, and I'm going to go treat myself to a trip down to the pub... merging 105 files is a bit of work! :-) Ciao. Jason R. Thorpe thorpej@nas.nasa.gov NASA Ames Research Center Home: 408.866.1912 NAS: M/S 258-6 Work: 415.604.0935 Moffett Field, CA 94035 Pager: 415.428.6939