>podule0 at podulebus0 : Alsystems : SCSI II host adapter : Power-tec (Arxe
>Systems) Generic SCSI with ATAP
>(yep it misses the I off the end)

Yep the current probes only grab the first 48 chars of the podule description.

Ok the problem here is that the VTi SCSI card is not support by RiscBSD.
By putting the Powertec PowerROM on the card it makes the card look like a
power-tec SCSI card and thus the kernel tries to attach the power-tec driver.

In my book the podule header identifies the podule not the software. ID's are
allocated the manufacturers and podule ID's are allocated for specific bits of
hardware. This mean that really although the card may have power-tec software
in ROM the podule ID should still report VTi etc. as the hardware has not
changed.
However the replacement ROM obviously uses alsystems ID etc. Thus to code
examining the podule e.g. RiscBSD the card identifies it self as a power-tec
SCSI card.

Since the power-rom supports if the VTi card probably users a FAS216 compatible
controller thus the driver is probably not much different from the powertec
driver but there are going to be some differences and unless the driver is
aware of the them an know which hardware it really has you will have a problem.

Immediate solution : None
eventual solution: I suppose I shall have to find a way of identifing a
power-tec card with a power-rom from any other card with a power-rom (Time to
talk to Gary I think). (Not ideal as this should not be needed according to the
expansion card specs)

>To overcome the problem for now I decided to have a go at compiling a kernel
>without the podulebus, the source was downloaded from ftp.ph.kcl.ac.uk.

best thing is to comment the ptsc driver out of the config file rather than the
whole podule bus. The ptsc driver is the one that is attached to the alsystems
scsi II card.

The best source tree to use these days is the standard NetBSD one.

> However when I use config to create the makefiles I get the following
>output:

>../../../conf/files:32: syntax error
>../../../conf/files:36: syntax error
>../../../conf/files:40: syntax error
>../../../conf/files:105: syntax error

Ok this is because you config binary and the source tree are incompatible.
There have been various changes to the source tree over time that require
modifiction to the config binary to support not configuration syntaxs etc.
Since the source on ftp.ph.kcl.ac.uk is quite old now I would suspect that your
installed config (if using 1.2) is too new.

I would suggest using the latest NetBSD sys source tree and the latest config
binary from the 1.2-release/upgrades directory.

Cheers,
				Mark

-- 
Mark Brinicombe				amb@physig.ph.kcl.ac.uk
Research Associate			http://www.ph.kcl.ac.uk/~amb/
Department of Physics			tel: 0171 873 2894
King's College London			fax: 0171 873 2716