Re: Guest section DW: "Re: [PATCH] Fix floppy io ports reservation

Re: Guest section DW: "Re: [PATCH] Fix floppy io ports reservation

[Anton Altaparmakov]

At 15:43 08/02/02, M.Bakker@research-int.com wrote:
>*       Reply: Guest section DW: "Re: [PATCH] Fix floppy io ports
>reservation" <1110.html>
>Hmmmm... and how do I tell those 12 faithfull  ps/2's (yep the real ones
>:model 31) still running everyday doing their job.....
>I'm afraid I haven't got the heart.......

Even if yours are affected you are unlikely to be wanting to enable PNPBIOS 
support in the kernel for them. And as long as you don't do that everything 
will continue to work as before my patch. The work around for this would be 
for the PNPBIOS driver in the kernel not to reserve ports 0x3f0 and 0x3f1 
on systems without a PNPBIOS. Thus on all recent systems PNPBIOS would take 
over 0x3f0 and 0x3f1 and  the floppy won't care and on really old systems 
PNPBIOS would not do that and hence the floppy will be happy, too, even 
though we don't reserve them. Having said that I am not convinced this is 
worth the effort as on such an old system PNPBIOS won't be doing anything, 
even if you compile it in, except for perhaps reserving ports, as there 
won't be anything supporting PNP in the system anyway...

I would tend to leave is as is (including my patch) until someone steps 
forward and actually shows a case where it breaks. From the comments so far 
I think we will never encounter such a case.

Anton

> >> ports 0x3f0 and 0x3f1 are used on certain PS/2 systems
> >> and on some very old AT clones
> >
> > [PS/2] Can you point me to the code for the PS/2 systems in question?
> > [AT] And we care because?
>You need not worry - these systems have been dead for over fifteen years.


-- 
   "I've not lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere." - Unknown
-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/

Re: Guest section DW: "Re: [PATCH] Fix floppy io portsreservation

[Gunther Mayer]

Anton Altaparmakov wrote:

> Even if yours are affected you are unlikely to be wanting to enable PNPBIOS
> support in the kernel for them. And as long as you don't do that everything
> will continue to work as before my patch. The work around for this would be
> for the PNPBIOS driver in the kernel not to reserve ports 0x3f0 and 0x3f1
> on systems without a PNPBIOS. Thus on all recent systems PNPBIOS would take
> over 0x3f0 and 0x3f1

This is a misunderstanding.

Compiling PNPBIOS into the kernel does _not_ mean 0x3f0 will be reserved.

So the legacy floppy ports are not a PNPBIOS issue on any machine.

-
Gunther

Re: Guest section DW: "Re: [PATCH] Fix floppy io portsreservation

[Anton Altaparmakov]

At 18:31 08/02/02, Gunther Mayer wrote:
>Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
>
> > Even if yours are affected you are unlikely to be wanting to enable PNPBIOS
> > support in the kernel for them. And as long as you don't do that everything
> > will continue to work as before my patch. The work around for this would be
> > for the PNPBIOS driver in the kernel not to reserve ports 0x3f0 and 0x3f1
> > on systems without a PNPBIOS. Thus on all recent systems PNPBIOS would take
> > over 0x3f0 and 0x3f1
>
>This is a misunderstanding.
>
>Compiling PNPBIOS into the kernel does _not_ mean 0x3f0 will be reserved.
>
>So the legacy floppy ports are not a PNPBIOS issue on any machine.

Excellent, in this case were my patch will always work and we are debating 
a non-issue and can stop here (unless I have broken any of the other 
architectures but I don't think I have). (-:

Anton


-- 
   "I've not lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere." - Unknown
-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/