I forgot to change the subject to something useful when I sent the e-mail.

Nathan J. Williams wrote:

> This usually means that the system firmware didn't configure an
> interupt for the device. I'm not sure what the BeBox's firmware tries
> to do with PCI devices, but whatever pre-boot firmware configuration
> is avaliable on the BeBox would be the place to fiddle with it.

Unfortunately, the BeBox has only a flash memory device with no means
to change anything interactively. The only way to change it is to write
a new image to the flash device. As far as I know, the knowledge about
the details of the internal structure seems to be lost with some former
employee of Be Inc., save for some rudimentary information how to boot
from floppy or harddisk.

> It's possible that the BeBox system design expects the kernel to do
> the work for non-builtin devices, but I don't see any code in the
> BeBox port to do that.

This seems to be a nontrivial problem (at least for me). Are there
any examples from other ports, where this kind of configuration is
done in the kernel instead of the firmware ?

I'll probably concentrate again on trying one of my ISA cards. My
NE2000 clone (Realtek 8019) did work, but produced too many
'ne0: device timeout' messages to be really usable.

ciao
     Klaus