[comp.unix.bsd] NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD FAQ (Part 9 of 10)

[Dave Burgess]

Posted-By: auto-faq 3.1.1.2
Archive-name: 386bsd-faq/part9

Section 8. ("Supported" Hardware List)

8.0 What hardware works!

The problem with this section of the FAQ is that software is
the only reason that every PC card on the planet does not work.

EISA cards are not directly supported; when and if EISA
is directly supported, they will give a significant performance
advantage to EISA bus machines. As it happens, users who desire
more than 16Meg of memory must use either VESA or EISA systems.
Even with an EISA system, many users will not be able to use the
address space above 16Meg unless their system uses only EISA
cards for those devices that need access to DMA. The limitations
are covered in another section of the FAQ.

Many EISA cards operate in an ISA emulation mode. Notably, the
Ultrastore 24F SCSI controller operates in an IDE emulation mode
that allows the card to be used in the current system without
modification. Most EISA cards that operate in ISA mode will
work with 386BSD, NetBSD, or FreeBSD.

Like EISA, MCA is unsupported currently; unlike EISA, it can't
work until it is supported, as it doesn't fall back to ISA
operation. If you want to work on this problem, I'm sure that
many people will appreciate it; you will probably need an ISA or
EISA machine to do the work, however.

On top of all of that, NetBSD (being the 'horizontal' entry in
the *BSD family) supports about 13 CPUs.

8.3.1 How do I configure multiport cards? Is there a possibility of
using multiport serial boards? How do you configure an AST/4
in the kernel? It looks like the AST driver only supports
4-port cards, but it looks like it would be easy to add support
for 8 ports ... or am I wrong?

From: "Martin Husemann" <mar...@euterpe.owl.de>
All AST 8 port Cards I have seen simply were two AST-4-port on
one board. You would configure them like this:

master ast0 at isa? port 0x1a0 tty irq 5 vector astintr
master ast1 at isa? port 0x2a0 tty irq 7 vector astintr

With that said, the discussion about these cards continues with
how to make older versions of *BSD react correctly to your AST
4 or 8 port cards.

The AST/4 and its clone multiport cards can run on 386BSD using
patchkit 0.2.4 and later, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. The only
problems seem to be that the code in older versions of
sioprobe() and sioattach() in sio.c needs to be hacked to get
it to properly detect the ports and then recognize the type
of UARTs installed (16550As). The code segment that is causing
the problem is included below:

A configuration for this is when two AST Four Port cards
are actually used in a system. The configuration for that looks
like this:

#device sio0 at isa? port "IO_COM1" tty irq 4 vector siointr
#device sio2 at isa? port "IO_COM3" tty irq 5 vector siointr

device sio1 at isa? port 0x2a0 tty flags 0x0481
device sio2 at isa? port 0x2a8 tty flags 0x0481
device sio3 at isa? port 0x2b0 tty flags 0x0481
device sio4 at isa? port 0x2b8 tty irq 5 flags 0x0481
vector siointr

device sio5 at isa? port 0x1a0 tty flags 0x0881
device sio6 at isa? port 0x1a8 tty flags 0x0881
device sio7 at isa? port 0x1b0 tty flags 0x0881
device sio8 at isa? port 0x1b8 tty irq 4 flags 0x0881
vector siointr

This is one of the areas where FreeBSD and NetBSD have
diverged. The actual semantics of the multiport boards have
changed since this section was originally written (the flags
are either no longer needed or are different in current NetBSD
implementations, for example).

8.3.3 What is the difference between baud and bits per second?

It's important to remember that we're transmitting symbols. Does
this apply to digital transmissions? Yes. A digital message is
simply an ordered sequence of symbols from a discreet source. This
source has an alphabet 'M' of 2 or more symbols, and produces
the symbols at some rate 'r'.

If we allocate a finite amount time alloted to a symbol, and call
that time 'D', we can for once and ever define what baud is. Having
'D', our "signaling rate" is:

r = 1/D (1)

measured in _symbols_per_second_ or baud. For binary transmissions,
we have a bit duration Tb, and our "bit rate" is:

rb = 1/Tb (2)

measured in _bits_per_second_, (bps, or b/s).

Now we note that in the special binary (M=2) case, each bit is
a symbol and thus D=Tb, and by (1) and (2) we have:

r (baud) = rb (bps) (3)

or in English, for *binary* transmissions, we have "the signalling
rate, measured in baud, is the same as the bit rate, which is
measured in bps." For all other transmissions, the signalling
rate (baud) is not equal to the bit rate (bps).

-Ade "never wants to see this again" Barkah

8.4 Disk Controller Problems

There is no real list of supported wd-driver controllers. The listx
would be far longer than I am willing to type. Suffice it to say
that virtually every know IDE/ESDI/MFM/RLL hard drive controller
available works. There are occasional reports that the driver
for this particular type of disk drive is "broken", but it is hard
to substantiate this. There are a few known "gotchas" with this
particular controller type, but they are fixed as soon as they are
found.

8.4.2 SCSI controller problems

Every once on a great while, someone will post a problem with a
SCSI controller. Almost all of these are attributed to either
a) bad cables (or out of spec cables), b) bad termination, or
c) incorrect irq/drq setup. Here is an excerpt of a message
that provides some insight into one man's problems with the
Adaptec controller, and one with the BusLogic 445.

From: wi...@rwwa.com (Robert Withrow)

Problem: When the bus hangs, all devices have their access
lights off, the AHA his its light on.

Being in a hurry, I made several changes and the problem went
away. Normally, I would change one thing at a time, but, like I
said, I was in a hurry. Below, I list the changes I made:

1) I replaced the AHA with an older one I keep as a spare.

2) I *inserted* the the ``synchronous negotiation'' jumper in
the aha.

3) I removed the terminator power jumper from two of the hard
drives.

4) I removed and reinserted all of connectors into all of the
drives.

If I had to guess, I bet #2 was the thing that fixed the
problem.

The system has compiled X11 three times as well as done all
sorts of other things including all of the drives (cdrom, disk,
and tape) for three days now without a single hang.

w...@ebh.eb.ele.tue.nl (Willem Jan Withagen) writes:

=> => The BT kernel requires the controller to be configured
=> => for IRQ 12. That is a strange default. The default for
=> => the BT445S is 11, the same as for the 1542. You probably
=> => just need to reconfigure the controller.
=>
=> So I redid the switches and the BT kernel recognizes it on
=> int 12. Either with or without EISA DMA (switch 2-10)
=>
=> it no longer generates the stray interrupt 7.
=> But it still doesn't boot after the message
=> 'changing root device to fd0d'
=>
=> So what's going on here. Is there anyway to find out more?
=> Or should I go to one of the FreeBSD lists and discuss it there?

I was browsing thru the hardware manual of the BT 445S and there
it was on the next page :-( I was just misguided by the nice
switches on the card edge.

To set the interrupts not only the dip-switches need to be changed.
More important is the actual and physical connection of intr 12 to
the ISA bus connector.

After taking the board out, and really connecting intr 12, the
system booted the BT kernel without a glitch. I'm now compiling a
new kernel with all our options set as we'd like them to be.

The current config:
16 Mb
BT 445S with intr 12 and switch 2-10 in default state,
giving DMA on channel 5.

Things I'm going to test:
toggling the 2-10 switch
adding 16 MB more.

8.5 SCSI Controllers

The list of "supported" hard drive controllers is very short.
Basically, it is any hard drive controller that emulates a
standard IDE/ESDI/MFM controller and a few SCSI controllers.
The short list is included below:

These boot with the kcaha floppy:
Adaptec 1522 ISA SCSI Experimental
AIC-6260 based ISA SCSI
AIC-6360 based ISA SCSI
Adaptec 1540[ABC] ISA SCSI No Floppy
Adaptec 1542[ABC] ISA SCSI
Adaptec 174x EISA SCSI
Adaptec 294x ???? SCSI Not supported
Ultrastore 14F ISA SCSI
Ultrastore 24F EISA SCSI
Ultrastore 34F VLB SCSI
Buslogic BT542 ISA SCSI
Buslogic BT545 ISA SCSI (Old ones only)
Buslogic BT946C PCI SCSI
NCR 53C810 based PCI SCSI

These boot with the kcbt floppy:
Buslogic BT742A EISA SCSI
Buslogic BT747A EISA SCSI (modified 742 driver)
Buslogic BT445S VLB SCSI

Note that the Ultrastore 24F is supported with an experimental
driver or in IDE emulation mode only. Any controller that
purports to be a clone of one of the cards listed above will
usually work as well.

The '{something} based' cards above are special in that many
controllers use these controller chips as the basis for their
implementation. The AIC-6260 is the chip set in the Adaptec
1522 series controllers, and the AIC-6360 is the chipset used
in the Soundblaster SCSI controller. There are several PCI
controllers that are using the NCR chipset.

In addition, there is a special note for Buslogic card users.

The card should be configured to use ioaddr 0x330 and IRQ 12.
There are two places the IRQ needs to be set. The first is a
bank of dip switches, and te next is a jumper. See your hard
drive controller documentation for the exact settings.

Once you've got the controller on the right settings. As it
says in the README.INSTALL file, after all:

BT742 SCSI Cntlr. 0x330 12 [kcopy-bt-floppy]

So I can only conclude that you've probably not configured the
card for EISA DMA! From the /usr/src/KNOWNBUGS file:

/sys/1/isa/bt742a.c
The Bt445S and Bt747 controllers can cause problems when
ISA DMA is selected as an option. With the EISA controller
the remedy is easy - simply turn it off using your EISA
configuration utility. With the Bt445S, which is a VLB
card, you must switch the undocumented "SW10" on "SB2" to
the off position. Also note that certain revisions of the
Buslogic board (Revision C or earlier, firmware revision
<3.37) will cause DATA CORRUPTION with systems containing
more than 16MB of memory. If you find this to be the case,
temporarily remove your extra memory and contact Buslogic
for an upgrade!

The BT946C PCI card works flawlessly. The only thing that needs
to be done to it is to ensure that the the two jumpers that
control how and if to autoconfig are removed. This allows the
system to autoconfigure everything in the card. The best thing
to do is simply set the card to use the "Autoconfig to default"
option.

8.6 Network Cards

Common misconception number 1: Why does BSD still support such
a small selection of network cards?

Depends on what you mean by `small'. Here is the 'short list'.

3c501 isa if_el (kim...@cs.umass.edu)
3c503 isa if_el (mycroft)
3C507 isa if_el (mycroft)
3c509 isa if_ep bnc/aui/utp. (tdr)
3c579 eisa if_ep (tdr)
WD 8390-based cards isa if_ed (mycroft)
SMC 8390-based cards isa if_ed (mycroft)
NE1000, NE2000 isa if_ed (mycroft)
NE2100/BICC Isolan/DEPCA isa if_le (mycroft)
AT&T StarLAN (82586-based cards) (mycroft)

These are all in NetBSD, and FreeBSD (by inference)

Common question number 2: I have a 3Com 3c509 - is it supported?

The 3C509 works well under NetBSD-current, and has been clocked
at full ethernet speed. To use the UTP connection, you will need
to specify the link0 and link1 options in the ifconfig command.

-link0 disable AUI/UTP. enable BNC.
link0 disable BNC. enable AUI.
link1 if the card has a UTP connector, and link0 is
set too, then you get the UTP port.

8.7 Printers

First, set up your printer so it uses the 'LF' code as its
CR+LF (End of line) character. If you use your machine for
operations in more than one OS (like some of us that HAVE
to use DOS :-( ) then you can include a control sequence in
the 'ff' control in your /etc/printcap file.

Here is an example printcap to show you how simple it is:

lp|ljgpc_deskjet|HP DeskJet Plus:\
:lp=/dev/lpt0:mx#0:\
:sd=/var/spool/ljgpc_deskjet:\
:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\
:ff=\033E\033&k2G:fo:sh:tr=\033E:

For the HP LaserJet III (running PostScript) or the Deskjet 540
printers, the sequence is a little more involved:

First, it looks like you will need to install ghostscript. I have
a Desk Jet 540 that I use with the printcap entry and filter
included below. You could hack the filter slightly to produce
output for your Laser Jet III (try changing "-sDEVICE=djet500" to
"-sDEVICE=ljet3").

You'll need perl and gs installed on your system. You also need to
ensure that gs has the ljet3 driver installed. You can find out by
running "gs -h" and looking to see if the driver is listed.

--- printcap entry ---
lp|HP Deskjet 540:\
:lo=/var/spool/lpd/lp-lock:\
:lp=/dev/lpt0:\
:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\
:of=/var/spool/ps-filter:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd:\
:sh:

--- /var/spool/ps-filter ---
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Filter which detects postscript files and appends cr to lines of text.
# $Id: ps-filter,v 1.3 1995/02/14 01:05:59 brian Exp $

$cat="/bin/cat";
$gs="/usr/local/bin/gs";

$_ = <STDIN>;
if (/^%!/)
{
# Pipe the file as-is to the ghostscript interpreter.
# Postscript files have their pages reversed because my
# DeskJet 540 stacks them in reverse order if I don't.
$old_dir=`pwd`;
$tmp_dir = "/tmp/lp-gs.$$";
mkdir($tmp_dir,0700);
chdir $tmp_dir;
open(PIPE, "|$gs -q -sDEVICE=djet500 -sOutputFile=%03d.lj -")
|| die "$0: can't run ghostscript: $!";
print PIPE $_;
while (<STDIN>)
{
print PIPE $_;
}
close PIPE;
@pages=reverse(sort(<*.lj>));
system $cat, @pages;
unlink @pages;
chdir $old_dir;
rmdir $tmp_dir;
}
elsif (&isprint() && !/\r\n$/)
{
# Send the text to the printer with trailing lf converted to crlf.
s/([^\r])?\n$/\1\r\n/;
print;
while (<STDIN>)
{
s/([^\r])?\n$/\1\r\n/;
print;
}
}
else
{
print;
while (<STDIN>)
{
print;
}
}
sub isprint
{
($c) = split(//,$_);
return ($c =~ /[\s\n]/) || (ord($c) >= 32 && ord($c) < 127);
}

If you are having trouble with the JetDirect card, this entry
should work adequately for you, although printing and querying
may not be completely solid:

laser: \
:rm=laser.kew.utl: \
:rp=lp: \
:sd=/usr/spool/lpd/laser: \
:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: \
:sh: \
:rs: \
:ff=: \
:fo

8.7.1 How can I print big files (especially from SAMBA, the WfWg
network program)?

First step: Add ":mx#0:" to the printer's entry in /etc/printcap.

Once you have "mx#0" in your /etc/printcap entry, make
sure you have enough disk space in the "/var" filesystem to
handle the job. Also beware that "lpr -s" can fail obscurely
if the file you are printing (and the path to it) are not accessible
by the user daemon.

8.8 Tape Drives.
8.8.1 What are the jumper configurations for the Exabyte 8200 DAT tape
drive?

Jumpers/switches are on the MX board. I think that the top of the
case and the board must be removed to access jumpers/switches.
Per a November 1989 8200 Spec there are at least two different MX
boards. Level 1, part no 724021-xxx has jumpers. Level 2, part no
724022-xxx has switches.

Level 1 Jumper Configuration:

J1 L-M Bypass Memory Test - 8 Second Startup
M-R Run Memory Test - 65 Second Startup

J2 L-M Parity Checking Enabled
M-R Parity Checking Disabled

J3 L-M Even Byte Disconnect
M-R Odd or Even Byte Disconnect

J4 L-M No Busy Enable
M-R Report Busy Status

J5 L-M P6 Cartridge Type - Domestic
M-R P1 Cartridge Type - International

J6 L-M Reserved for future use

J7 L-M Normal Operations
M-R No Disconnect in Data Phase

J8 L-M Fixed Block Mode on Power Up
M-R Variable Block Mode on Power Up

Level 2 Switch Configuration:

SW1 Off Run Memory Test - 65 Second Startup
On Bypass Memory Test - 8 Second Startup

SW2 Off Parity Checking Disabled
On Parity Checking Enabled

SW3 Off Odd or Even Byte Disconnect
On Even Byte Disconnect

SW4 Off Report Busy Status
On No Busy Enable

SW5 Off Fixed Block Mode on Power Up
On Variable Block Mode on Power Up

SW6 Off Normal Operations
On No Disconnect in Data Phase

SW7 Off Reserved for Future Use
On

SW8 Off P6 Cartridge Type - Domestic
On P1 Cartridge Type - International

8.9 QIC-40/80 tape drives

Steve Gerakines has released a series of patches for FreeBSD that
allow the use of the QIC-40/80 tape drives through the floppy
controller. Get them from ftp.gte.com:/pub/ft/dist0.3/dist0.3.tgz
or a similar mirror site, if there are any. Archie will be able
to tell you for certain.

8.10 CD-ROMs

The Sony CDU 561 works well, as do the Toshiba 401 and 4101. The
4101 is a double speed SCSI-2 device and allows 'grabbing' of
music tracks.

Many folks have announced that they had problems with Mitsumi
CD-ROM drives. It seems that there are nearly as many releases
of the firmware as there were drives sold. Many of the firmware
versions were incompatible with each other. A generic Mitsumi
driver will be a hard act to accomplish, if it is possible at all.
The current Mitsumi driver seems to work well with all of the
Mitsumi controllers (FD-001x and older).

There are native (non-EIDE) Mitsumi CD-ROM drivers for NetBSD and
FreeBSD. They are available in the latest release version of each.
If your CD-ROM is not recognized by the kernel, and uses a Mitsumi
controller, you will need to make changes to the mcd.c source
file to change the behavior of the first getreply() function.
Instead of exiting immediately, the check for whether the
getreply was successful should be commented out and assumed to
be correct. While this is a brute force method (it may find a
CD-ROM that isn't even there) it will help many Mitsumi
controllers probe correctly.

The EIDE ATAPI CD-ROM drive is now supported in the -current
versions of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and is supported experimentally
in NetBSD Version 1.2 and higher.

FreeBSD also supports the Matsushita (Panasonic) CD-ROM drives.

The only other commonly available CD-ROM drive that is not
supported is the SONY CD-ROM.

8.10.1 How can I mount my CD-ROM so that it appears to be writable?

There are two ways. If the version of *BSD you have supports
the union file system, you can use the following:

mount -t union -o -b /cdrom/ports /usr/ports
cd /usr/ports
make all install

If you want to use an fstab entry, try this:

/cdrom/ports /usr/src union rw,-b 0 0

If your version of *BSD doesn't support union file systems, you
could use something like this:

mount /dev/cd0a /cdrom
mkdir /usr/ports
cd /usr/ports
lndir /cdrom/ports .
<wait for dirs to link up>

cd /usr/ports/mail/elm
make all install

--
Dave Burgess Network Engineer - Nebraska On-Ramp, Inc.
*bsd FAQ Maintainer / SysAdmin for the NetBSD system in my spare bedroom
"Just because something is stupid doesn't mean there isn't someone that
doesn't want to do it...."