On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Neil Hoggarth wrote:

> Hi Folks!
> 
> My CATS ATX system turned up at the end of last week. I wanted to
> check the status of the CATS support in the publically available
> NetBSD-current source tree, and how this compares to the system source
> which came pre-installed on the machine's disk?

The source that were supplied are NetBSD 1.3F. I have versions of
NetBSD-current running on the CATS with just a couple of hickups to iron
out (e.g. raw floppy access is working but block dev floppy is not).

> If I was to sup current system source, would I be upgrading,
> downgrading or breaking what I've got at the moment?  :-)
Breaking. A number of changes came about following the shark merge and
patches are required.

> I note that support for the CATS is described as "work in progress" on
> the NetBSD/arm32 web pages, but I'm not sure how up to date this
> information is.

Work in progress sums it up. In fact that still describe the whole port in
my view, I don't think I would ever call it finished ;-)

> Also: Is anyone successfully using a SCSI card with a CATS board yet?
> I'll need one to connect up my tape drive. Can I just pick a card off
> the list of MI PCI drivers and expect it to work?
Not quite

> (http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/pci.html seems to imply that this is
> the case, but I'd like some reassurance before I part with any cash
> :-)).
This list will need updating for arm32 PCI support.

A number of MI PCI drivers can be used. The proviso is that they MUST be
bus space and bus dma based drivers. Drivers that support bus mastering
but not bus dma will not work with the ARM.

For SCSI cards the isp driver (Qlogic cards) work fine. I run a CD-R from
one of these cards on an EBSA285 box. The adaptec driver has also been
tested with the 2940 SCSI card but I have not extensively used this as
much as the qlogic cards.

NCR53C8XX based cards are very very cheap but these don't work yet as the
ncr driver does not use the bus dma macros and thus suffers lack of cache
/memory coherency.

Cheers,
				Mark