Re: isapnp(4) - how does it work on non-PnP machines?

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 07:46:14PM +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> I think that you could either modify the isapnp driver not to allocate,
> or the specific driver to free the ones it does not use, or creater
> an isa driver that just occupies the resources. But why? Why does it
> matter? What else is going to use them?

The point is not "what is going to use it" (of course nothing will),
but will the existing (non- covered) physical mappings cause colliding
ISAPNP allocations to fail.

Many EISA bioses used to have an option to reserve ISA spaces, not sure
if simple ISAPNP versions of that exist and whether the kernel could
find such reservations in a bios table somewhere.

If not, I would suggest to add a /etc/boot.cfg command to reserve such
a range and add a bootinfo descriptor for it.

Ugly, quite some work, and "is it really worth to do that in 2015" is the
obvious question to answer beforehand.


Martin