Re: Trivial hack for pccardd(8)

> Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 21:18:58 -0800
> From: richard childers <[email protected]>
> Sender: [email protected]
> 
> I've been developing a standard FreeBSD installation, designed to
> run equally well on laptops and servers, using the same basic
> layout and modules.
> 
> Because I do most of my development on a laptop (on top of the
> washing machine in the basement, if you must know :-), and I
> spend a lot of time rebooting to test the installation sequence
> (IE, I have installed FreeBSD about 500 times in the past six
> weeks), it came to my attention that a lot of my services didn't
> boot right because when they came up, the pccardd(8) was still
> initializing the PCMCIA card, and the network was not yet up.
> 
> The pccardd script (rc.pccard?) and the network script
> (rc.network) are only a few lines apart in /etc/rc. The fix was
> to test dmesg output for devices associated with a PCMCIA bus,
> and if any were detected, to assume it was  laptop and sleep a
> few extra seconds while pccardd(8) did its stuff (actually, about
> 30 seconds, although I coul d get by with 15 seconds, maybe).
> 
> I'm curious if anyone else has done this; and why such a
> common-sense thing never made it into the FreeBSD release. What
> am I missing?
> 
> Yes, I know about rc.mobile; it's been around for a few years,
> there's an article on it by a chap in Germany. I like the concept
> but not the pseudo-GUI; the idea fits well into the FreeBSD
> paradigm, I think, but the implementation was Linux-derived and
> perhaps not easily integrated into the BSD boot-time reality (an
> interactive boot shellscript? how does the system boot when no
> one is present?).
> 
> Don't tell me, let me guess; rc.mobile is part of FreeBSD 5.0?

While some of what you are discussing seems interesting and potentially
useful, The solution to the problem you state seems to be he use of
the '-z' option to pccardd. I ALWAYS add 'pccardd_flags="-z"' to
rc.conf. It solves a great many potential startup problems at the
slight cost of about an added 5-10 seconds per boot.

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: [email protected]			Phone: +1 510 486-8634

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