Subject: Re: non-netboot Blue G3s
To: Dan Winship <danw@MIT.EDU>
From: David A. Gatwood <marsmail@globegate.utm.edu>
List: port-macppc
Date: 05/06/1999 14:04:39
On Thu, 6 May 1999, Dan Winship wrote:

> I looked at the Darwin BMac driver, but I couldn't see anything
> obvious that it was doing that our driver isn't. What spec was the
> driver based on?

What sorts of problems are you having with BMac?  MkLinux's bmac driver
didn't do anything on machines above about 266 MHz for a while (coinciding
with the second motherboard revision, I think).  I scratched my head for a
while on that one, comparing MkLinux's driver to the almost identical
LinuxPPC driver.  I tried inplementing BMac+ support, and asked folks to
test the modified driver with a hack to make it think it was a bmac+, and
of course that crashed, but some folks tried it with the same modified
kernel with the bmac+ hack off and it suddenly worked.  Upon further
investigation, I noticed that I'd put in several additional delay
instructions from LinuxPPC, in addition to the bmac+ changes.  In other
words, there are some places where delays are critical to the driver
function.  Definitely worth studying in detail with that in mind.  Beyond
that, is your driver from scratch, or is it a port of the MkLinux driver?
And what's the behaviour?


Later,
David

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