Subject: RE: Re: Do YDL support 'foreign' hardware?
From: Charles Lepple (charles@ghz.cc)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 08:11:59 MDT
--On Monday, May 07, 2001 8:29 AM -0400 Chris Ruprecht
<cruprech@compucom.com> wrote:
> What I fear is that they have sme code in their ROMs which is x86
> specific which then doesn't run on anything else. The adaptec card has
> this Ctrl-A on startup option which puts you into
> Setup/Low-Level-Format-Harddrive mode which is definitely running on x86
> machines and I have serious doubts that there is any code in there to do
> similar things on PPC.
As I mentioned before, I don't think the Linux Adaptec 29xx driver uses
anything from the ROM (except for autotermination options and the like).
The "Mac version" of that card would probably have FCode to allow Open
Firmware to boot from it, but that's about it.
The ROMs on most PC-oriented PCI cards these days only contain enough code
to allow the system to boot (and, as you pointed out, setup programs
sometimes exist - but they run outside the context of an OS). Once the
system has booted, faster 32-bit drivers are usually loaded once you are in
the OS. On a PC, the only time Linux makes BIOS calls is for APM, and
likewise, I don't believe that many Linux/PPC drivers have to make OF calls
to support Mac-specific hardware (besides getting device tree information).
Bottom line: enable the Adaptec 29xx driver in the kernel, and that card
should work :-)
-- Charles Lepple <charles@ghz.cc> http://ghz.cc/charles/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Mon May 07 2001 - 07:17:08 MDT