Hi All,

    I tried to make a start with a NetBSD/Atari FAQ. It was triggered
by Helmar's question about the St-mem pool. So below is the first
FAQ item ;-) Could someone with a Falcon fill in the blanks about the
screen memory used for the different video modes?
As always, all comments are welcome....

I have a feeling, that the next sections will be about:
	- how can I increase the number of virtual consoles
	- how can I build my own kernel

Am I right Helmar ;-) I will try to write those sections tomorrow.
I have no idea yet where I'm going to put the FAQ, I'll try to
figure that out too.

Leo.


The kernel says: "St-mem pool exhausted, binpatch 'st_pool_size'"
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The 'St-mem pool' is a allocated at boot-time. It is located in the
lower 16Mb of memory. It is used by drivers for Atari peripherals
that were designed for the old 1024-ST that had an 24-bit address bus.
As it is currently impossible to specify where to allocate memory at
run-time, there is no other way than allocate this memory at boot-time,
before memory management is setup.
The St-mem pool is currently used by the video, floppy and the Falcon
SCSI driver.
The default (BOOT) kernel supplied has a rather small St-mem pool. This
is done to enable it to boot in systems having only 4Mb of ram. In fact
it has a pool just big enough for 2 virtual consoles in ST-mode.
You can extend the size of the pool by 'binpatch'-ing the kernel. In the
distribution directory '.../utils.NetBSD', you can find a 'binpatch' binary
and manual page. For setting the St-mem pool size, issue the following
command from the shell prompt:
    binpatch -s _st_pool_size -o 8192 -r <new_size> <path to kernel>

The value of <new_size> should be given in bytes and depends on the
following:
    video-resolution:
         ST-mode:  32Kb + 8Kb slack
         TT-mode: 154Kb + 8Kb slack
         Falcon modes:
----> could someone fill me in on these!!!!!
    Falcon SCSI bounce buffers:
         I think about 16Kb per SCSI target will do.
    Floppy:
         Maximum 1 track == 18Kb

Note that each virtual console needs a video buffer. So you should multiply
the value needed by the video by the number of virtual consoles defined.