epia800

[Eric W. Biederman]

SONE Takeshi <ts1 at 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