SONE Takeshi ts1@tsn.or.jp writes:
On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 02:27:08AM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Actually the FILO polled IDE derives most directly from etherboot 5.1.
There are a couple of small differences but nothing that looked too substantial. The biggest is the ide_bus_floating() that attempts to quickly see if an IDE cable is absent.
Yes, I took it from Etherboot 5.1. I added floating bus detection, and also changed the soft reset code to see if the drive asserts BSY.
I have seen IDE cables with a memory so I am not at all certain about the floating detection.
FILO does look good from what I have seen of it.
I'm really glad to hear that from you.
The one thing I would really like to see is it using the LinuxBIOS table to find motherboard devices. Before falling back to more conventional things like a pci scan. That way you don't need to guess where the hardware is. Right now this is a chicken and the egg problem because that information is not being exported but that is one of the next steps for the freebios2 tree.
Before anyone can guess anything we need a lot more detailed bug report than what has been seen so far.
Steve how does your 1.2G Caviar fail? Is it not detected or is the problem something else?
I think his problem is something related with geometry. Not with detection.
I thought I had a similar WD drive in my junk box, and I looked for it today, without success. Instead I've found a 250MB Conner(!) drive, and it worked perfectly with FILO!
SONE do you really have a system that with no IDE disk has the BSY bit stuck high. Or is that just what happens when you scan PIO ports that are not connected to and IDE controller.
On EPIA the BSY bit is low when drive is absent, and it is the only real hardware I run FILO. However, it helps quickly skipping the non-existent 3rd and 4th IDE controllers, as you pointed out.
Right. But if there are better ways of detecting the hardware I would rather we use that.
Eric