Subject: Re: Standard G3/400 powerbook fully supported?
To: None <toddpw@best.com>
From: William O Ferry <woferry@iname.com>
List: port-macppc
Date: 08/05/1999 08:39:53
> Are there any devices on the original G3/400 powerbook that are _not_
> supported yet?

Todd,
	I'd post my dmesg output, but it appears that when I did a disklabel
last night it completely wiped out the partition table on the drive, I
currently can't access any of the NetBSD or MacOS partitions on the drive.
I'm hoping that DiskDoctor can resurrect my boot partition and pdisk can do
the rest of the partitions (glad I wrote down all of the sector locations..  =)

From memory what didn't work on my G3/333 with a "standard" -current kernel
was:

USB
media-bay CD/DVD
SCSI

I have a suspicion on why USB reports a failure on boot, I have to talk to
Lennart about it.

The media-bay support appears to be there, it's just not enabled in any of
the kernels in the conf directory.  I added the lines:

mediabay* at obio?
wdc* at mediabay? flags 0x0

	And it seemed to just work.  It detected the CD drive, and was able
to read a disk I had in the drive.  I suspect this only catches devices
inserted at boot, and hot-swapping of devices isn't really supported yet,
but I didn't try it so I can't say that for sure.

I believe the catch with the SCSI is also a simple one, I just can't try it
out until I get my machine booting again.  It seems Open Firmware decided
to call it "scsi" instead of "mesh" now, and our code (mesh.c) only matches
the "mesh" string.  I'm fairly sure it's the same device, the newest model
seems to have the same I/O controller chip the previous model had.

	As I'd described yesterday I also couldn't get X to work (mouse, but
no keyboard), hopefully this is just an adjustment that has to be made to
support the new wsmux code.  No clue if the X server has any support for this
PowerBook's built-in dual-headed ability (different internal and external
displays at the same time), I'd tend to doubt it.

	I also think the power management support is still lacking.  It seems
to be able to power down and reboot the machine (a few months ago on a G3/233
I tried those operations simply caused the PMU to reset and redownload itself
as if the machine had been powered for the first time ever).  I'd imagine
display brightness control and such aren't there, but I certainly could be
wrong.

	So I think things are close, but they're not quite there yet...

							Will