We've been talking about this for years, but nobody has done it.
(and I don't think anybody has used this for debugging since Doug
and I were doing the initial bootstrapping..)
By default, we will end up with a duplicate set of hints if people have
a properly populated /boot/device.hints. So for now, remove the hints
here until Peter revisits the new hints processing from mid-June that
broke Alpha booting.
Use Warner Losh's "hint" driver to decode ascii strings to fill the
resource table at boot time.
config(8) no longer generates an ioconf.c table - ie: the configuration
no longer has to be compiled into the kernel. You can reconfigure your
isa devices with the likes of this at loader(8) time:
set hint.ed.0.port=0x320
userconfig will be rewritten to use this style interface one day and will
move to /boot/userconfig.4th or something like that.
It is still possible to statically compile in a set of hints into a kernel
if you do not wish to use loader(8). See the "hints" directive in GENERIC
as an example.
All device wiring has been moved out of config(8). There is a set of
helper scripts (see i386/conf/gethints.pl, and the same for alpha and pc98)
that extract the 'at isa? port foo irq bar' from the old files and produces
a hints file. If you install this file as /boot/device.hints (and update
/boot/defaults/loader.conf - You can do a build/install in sys/boot) then
loader will load it automatically for you. You can also compile in the
hints directly with: hints "device.hints" as well.
There are a few things that I'm not too happy with yet. Under this scheme,
things like LINT would no longer be useful as "documentation" of settings.
I have renamed this file to 'NOTES' and stored the example hints strings
in it. However... this is not something that config(8) understands, so
there is a script that extracts the build-specific data from the
documentation file (NOTES) to produce a LINT that can be config'ed and
built. A stack of man4 pages will need updating. :-/
Also, since there is no longer a difference between 'device' and
'pseudo-device' I collapsed the two together, and the resulting 'device'
takes a 'number of units' for devices that still have it statically
allocated. eg: 'device fe 4' will compile the fe driver with NFE set
to 4. You can then set hints for 4 units (0 - 3). Also note that
'device fe0' will be interpreted as "zero units of 'fe'" which would be
bad, so there is a config warning for this. This is only needed for
old drivers that still have static limits on numbers of units.
All the statically limited drivers that I could find were marked.
Please exercise EXTREME CAUTION when transitioning!
Moral support by: phk, msmith, dfr, asmodai, imp, and others
