Hi Claes,

> I am trying to get tpb (sysutils/tpb) working on a IBM Thinkpad X40,
> tpb needs access to /dev/nvram and I cant find anything in the kernel
> or in MAKEDEV that would produce such as device. The notebook is
> running NetBSD-CURRENT from 2004 nov 30. Any ideas where I should
> look?

I wrote a read only nvram pseudo-device as a kernel loadable module and 
I'd like to know if you're interested in testing it. Frankly it's 
nothing but a quick and dirty hack, however it works reasonably well for 
me (at least tpb now works on my R40 laptop).

If you're happy with it I could try to work something clean and useful 
out of it.


Miscellaneous questions to the list:

I couldn't find the exact semantics of nvram. Should it be seekable, 
writable, should it support ioctl? etc.

How come there isn't a nvram device in NetBSD/i386 already? Probably 
beacuse accessing the non volatile ram area directly is a bad 
programming habit. Does such a device driver belong in NetBSD after all?

-- 
Cyrille Szymanski