[ On Fri, March 6, 1998 at 10:33:22 (-0500), D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote: ]
> Subject: DigiBoard
>
> I checked the compatibility list on the web page and I see support
> for AST and Boca "style" cards.  Would one of these include DigiBoard?
> If not has anyone looked at porting the FreeBSD driver?

Are you referring to the DigiBoard PC/Xe and/or PC/Xi cards?

If so, then not likely (i.e. the AST and Boca cards are simple IRQ
sharing multi-UART devices, and the PC/X? are "intelligent serial
multiport cards".  The FreeBSD dgb driver is a polling-only driver.

Given the current politics I doubt FreeBSD's driver will ever make it
into NetBSD (it's based on FreeBSD's GPLv2'ed sio driver).

However I think I recall someone mentioning an sio port to NetBSD once
upon a time, and if so then it should be possible to look at what was
done and transliterate that to the dgb driver to also port it.

You may also want to look at the Cyclades board.  It is semi-intelligent
(hardware based RTS/CTS flow control) and *should* also have much higher
aggregate bandwidth than a Boca or AST style card.

BTW, we tried using the BB2016 under FreeBSD at Leitch, and it didn't
work.  The driver only reads one byte from the interrupt status register
and thus cannot support 16 ports.  The NetBSD boca manual page suggests
treating it as two separate boards sharing one IRQ, which might work
assuming the hardware properly splits the interrupts onto two registers,
but similar treatment would require changes to the FreeBSD drivers and
we didn't want to worry about that just yet.  That, combined with the
fact that we're only building a console server, so only need three wire
RS-232, and the fact that the BB2016 uses the extremely uncommon (but
extremely standards conforming) 10-pin RJ-45 connector (for which
nobody, not even AMP, make a DB-9 adapter), forced us to decide to just
use two BB-1208 boards instead.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets Of The Weird <woods@weird.com>