At some point in the not-too-distant past I corresponded at some length
with one or two insiders on this list (Allen and someone else, I think)
about getting my 128Meg optical drive supported by MacBSD.  Having just
recently gotten Alpha2 up, I thought I'd give it another try.  Here we
go again...

The drive in question is an Epson OMD-5010.  It is correctly identified
during the boot sequence, but I get the 'no explicit driver match'
message.  Since the drive doesn't get mapped to a device, there's not
much I can do with it after that.

Since the last time I posted about this, I have contacted Epson in
search of documentation.  After much phone tag, many voice mail menus,
and a bit of fast talking, I convinced them to send me the hardware
specs on the drive.  I eventually received in the mail a mediocre
photocopy of a rather spartan manual containing all of the SCSI
commands the drive understands, result codes it issues, etc.  I'm sure
this information would be helpful in adding support for this drive.

I'm not currently set up to compile the kernel (I haven't grabbed the
latest sources in months, and I'm not sure I have the disk space for
the build -- that's why I want to use the optical :-).  What sort of
info from the manual might be needed to get this working?  Would the
person responsible for the relevant part of the kernel be willing to
have a look?  (Allen?  Someone else?  I've lost track...)

I'm currently running the 02/21/94 kernel.  

FYI: This kernel correctly identifies my RasterOps 264/SE30 video card
during boot (Alpha1 always printed out a bogus name) and apparently
configures /dev/grf0 and /dev/grf1 correctly.  8-bit depth works, and
is as slow as the booter claims. :-)  The multi-screen console stuff is
nice!  

There are some cosmetic problems when both screens are receiving
output, though.  I'll have to play with it some more to describe the
problem exactly.  I think it's some weirdness with drawing the cursor
on the screen that's not currently selected.

BTW, was the change in the SCSI device mapping documented somewhere?
If it was, I must have missed it.  It really threw me for a bit (fsck
barfing, being unable to mount root as read/write, etc.), until I
figured out that the root filesystem wasn't on /dev/sd0a anymore.
(It's now on /dev/sd1a, presumably because my MacBSD drive is at SCSI
ID 1.  Probably a good idea, but knowing about it before it bit me
would have made my life easier.  ;-)

I also can't seem to log in as root on /dev/console anymore.  This
isn't really a problem, as I just uncommented the changes in /etc/ttys
that put that getty on /dev/con1 instead, but I'm curious as to what
happened.

- monroe

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