Re: [9fans] ether probing and 9load

Re: [9fans] ether probing and 9load

[jmk]

On Thu Mar 14 17:39:14 EST 2002, andrey@lanl.gov wrote:
> ...
> the question is: is there an easy way to probe for all ethercards[] or
> should we stick with the 'in-house' solution, which is
> strcpy(ctlr->type, "rtl8139"); in etherinit()
> ...

it's trivial to make 9load/plan9 scan for and find pnp devices such
as pci ethernet cards, we've been doing that internally. it's too fraught
with problems to poke around randomly for isa devices. in fact, we used
to do that and it caused such problems we created plan9.ini to get
round it. of course, that was before there were pnp devices (other than
eisa).

[9fans] ether probing and 9load

[andrey mirtchovski]

hi,

we put 9load in flash around here (disk on chip) and are having
linuxbios load it as a kernel.  it works quite nice on some
architectures and not so nice on others, but we're trying to squash
the bugs as much as possible.

the modifications we had to do to 9load to make it work with linuxbios
were amazingly few and mostly involved commenting out 16-bit asm
from l.s...  simple is good.

one problem that we're having is that 9load decidedly is unable to
find a plan9.ini file to read the machine configuration from.  if we
plug a disk into the machine and wait for it to spin (yes, by the time
linuxbios+9load start probing for disks they haven't even spun up yet)
then we can use the plan9.ini there, but the ultimate goal is to have
9load etherboot off the net.  therein lies the problem -- etherinit()
is called, but because isaconfig() finds no ethernet card there is no
card to call reset() for and as a result no ethernet appears in the
'boot from:' menu...

the question is: is there an easy way to probe for all ethercards[] or
should we stick with the 'in-house' solution, which is strcpy(ctlr->type, "rtl8139"); in etherinit()

thanx, andrey