A friend of mine brought over his brand-new Sony Vaio 505 laptop, and said,
"Can we get NetBSD on this tonight?"

It turned out the answer was no, but I'm wondering if other people
have tried.

What happened:

- The machine booted okay off of the floppy, but didn't detect any
  devices on the PCMCIA bus.  After some poking around, I found a
  Japanese web page at

http://delegate.uec.ac.jp:8081/club/mma/~shimizu/unix/netbsd/vaio_install.html

  which had a patch for the PCMCIA code (which basically consisted of
  inserting delay() calls in various spots of the PCMCIA code).  Once
  I did that and built a new install floppy, the PCMCIA code detected
  devices in the PCMCIA slot.

- The external CD-ROM drive plugs into the PCMCIA bus, and the CD manual
  says it's ATA compatible.  It shows -1 for the numeric vendor IDs and
  product IDs, and the CIS text information says it's a "NinjaATA".
  On a lark, I tried back-porting the -current PCMCIA wdc driver to 1.3.2;
  I got it compiled, but the machine panic()'d when I tried booting
  with a new install floppy (it was something from the wdc code, which
  lead me to believe that it wasn't a wdc controller, but it may have
  been my hasty back-porting).

- My friend had also bought a 3com 3C589D PCMCIA ethernet card.  We
  tried using that, and it probed and ifconfig'd up successfully, but
  it turns out it would only send packets, never receive any (however,
  now that I think about it, it may have been an IRQ problem, since the
  PCMCIA code assigned IRQ 9 to it, and I bet that was used by something
  else).  I'm assuming the 3C589D is really close to the 3C589, because
  it did power up the card and send packets successfully.

So, after spending a couple of hours working on it, we gave up
(part of it was that he had to take a flight this morning, and I
couldn't guarantee that I would be able to give him a working laptop
by the time his plane left :-/).

Some quick net searching shows that there are a lot of peple who
have done work on it in Japan (which isn't surprising, since the
Vaio was released in Japan for a while before it made it here).
Unfortunately, I don't know Japanese, so I can't read any of those
pages.  If there are any Japanese NetBSD hackers who could tell me
more about the Vaio, I'd love to talk to you!

If someone can tell me if there are docs on the NinjaATA CD-ROM card,
or point me to someone who did one, please tell me, because I've
been in the market for a laptop for a while, and if I can get
NetBSD to run on this thing, I'm getting one ASAP :-)

--Ken