Re: HME and IPX

On 5 August 2011 01:33, Mouse <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> While we are discussing IPX's. I quick review of the BSD's
>>> (Open/Net) indicate that there is no support for the HME 100MB sbus
>>> ethernet interface on the 4c platform.
>> How do you come to this conclusion?
>
> I don't know (I didn't write that), but...
>
>> hme(4) is in the default (GENERIC) kernel configuration:
>
> ...that doesn't mean much.  At least on Net, the kernel config is
> shared between 4, 4c, and 4m, so anything supported on any of them
> needs to be present.

In Open it appears that the GENERIC kernel supports 4, 4c and 4m but
there is also a separate config files for each of the individual
platforms if required. The HME interface only appears in GENERIC and
the 4m config files.

>> There may be a hardware or firmware incompatibility, that makes it
>> impossible to use a HME in a sun4c.
>
> Don't forget, the kernel doesn't probe the sbus; it depends on OBP to
> have done that - autoconf just walks the OBP device tree.  So if the
> OBP on the machine doesn't recognize it at least enough to get it into
> the device tree, the kernel won't do anything with it.

I didn't realise that. Thanks.

> At least that's how Net works.  Dunno if Open has reworked sparc
> autoconf enough to have changed that.

I doubt it. It sounds as though reworking autoconf would be a non
trivial task and I don't think OpenBSD sparc has changed all that much
recently.

Simon

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is
the utility of the final product."
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh