Subject: Re: PNPBIOS broken after last major rototill?
To: Rafal Boni <rafal@mediaone.net>
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
List: port-i386
Date: 10/18/2000 18:07:46
| I've only now gotten around to upgrading my laptop to a recent
| vintage of kernel (it was running some 1.4X, from ~ 4/30/2000 
| previously) and now find that it finds none of the pnpbios-
| attached devices.

Hmm.

| The problem is that the devices offered by the PNPBIOS on my
| laptop (a DEC VP765, if that matters, with PhoenixBIOS 4.0 rel-
| ease 6.0) have empty (zeroed out) static configs.. The PNPBIOS
| code takes that to mean 'device disabled'.

Ugh. Well, that's another problem with this mechanism.

| So, this gives rise to two questions:
| 	  (1) Does the PNPBIOS spec say anything about this? Is my
| 	      laptop somehow violating the standard by not offering
| 	      any resources in the static config?

| 	  (2) Is anyone else experiencing problems with PNPBIOS
| 	      devices claiming to be 'disabled' on their machines?

I think there are issues with this "fix" that I implemented.
For one thing, the pckbc the attachment still doesn't work on the Vaio.
Other laptops seem to have other quirks on particular pnpbios
indexes.

So I think we need some more generic quirk code, and probably
to pull out the static queries and go back the dynamic queries.

But not in time for 1.5.

--jhawk