In message <x7aeplsm8o.fsf@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com>,
Wolfgang Rupprecht writes:

>The Sony 505tx vaio that I have has a losing "ilink" port hardwired to
>irq9.  The worst part is you can't even turn off this proprietary
>piece of junk in the sony bios.

Hey, firewire would be nice, if we had a driver for it. :-)

The other side of the lossage is there's no way for a user to tell an
INSTALL (or GENERIC) kernel to avoid specific IRQs -- to change the
mask before the pcic gets attached. Or dynamically probe IRQs.  Or
whatever. The Pengui*** gets it right.

>The way I managed to install netbsd on the viao 505 was to:
>
>1) get the freebsd partition tool to repartition the disk in place.
>
>2) compiled a netbsd-current kernel with irq9 masked out, and cranked
>   out an install floppy with this kernel on it.
>
>3) booted, and after a few unsuccessful tries at sysinstall, 

Up to there, 1.4.1 sysinst worked fine for me.  I took the MBR
partition intended for a DOS D: disk, disklabelled, all fine.

> just nfs
>   mounted a directory containing a root and /usr snapshot.  I just
>   disklabeled and newfs-ed by hand and then untarred the snapshot.
> 
>4) At that point I rdist-ed the rest of my current setup over to the
>   vaio.

Ok. that much I can do, if I can get a kernel that'll boot right in
the first place. I'll try building a GENERIC kernel with a tweaked
intr_mask and try to boot diskless. Thanks!