Thanks to Dr. Tom Blinn for a definitive answer to my question about
isacfg slot numbers!
Judith Reed
jreed_at_appliedtheory.com
I said:
> On our Alphaserver 400s running DU 4.0b we have ATI Mach64 ISA VGA cards.
> The documentation for the Alphaservers has a brief section on using isacfg
> where it specifically says (on page A-18):
>
> -slot <slot#> Allows you to enter a unique slot number for each ISA adapter.
> You can assign the numbers in any order. The slot number does
> not relate to a physical ISA adapter position in the
> motherboard.
>
> We changed the cpu board on a crashing system, and after that the (previously
> working) Mach64 card stopped working.
:
> Examination showed that the isacfg parameters on the cpu board with which
> the Mach64 card worked were:
>
> slot device handle
> 7 0 MACH64 Singleport Yes
>
> and the isacfg parameters on the cpu board with which the Mach64 card did not
> work were:
>
> 2 0 MACH64 Singleport Yes
>
> When I went in and changed the "2" to a "7", the Mach64 card worked on
> reboot. Obviously, the documentation for ISACFG, quoted above, is wrong.
Dr. Blinn responds:
The documentation on "isacfg" is correct as far as it goes. What it does
not tell you is that once you build a "custom" kernel for your system, the
kernel will have a static map from the isacfg data on the system where you
built the kernel to specific data structures in the kernel, and if you then
change the isacfg data (as was done when the CPU module was replaced), you
either have to make the isacfg data match what the kernel expects, or you
have to rebuild the kernel (e.g., boot genvmunix and run doconfig again, or
edit your target config file and make the isa options slot independent by
replacing the slot # with a ? wildcard). Order matters, slot numbers do
matter for a target kernel, the generic genvmunix has slot-independent
device information (you can look at /sys/conf/GENERIC to see what it looks
like).
Received on Fri Oct 24 1997 - 23:07:30 NZDT