Issues of hardware compatibility are among the most
troublesome in the computer industry today and FreeBSD is by
no means immune to trouble. In this respect, FreeBSD's
advantage of being able to run on inexpensive commidity PC
hardware is also its liability when it comes to support for
the amazing variety of components on the market. While it
would be impossible to provide a exhaustive listing of
hardware that FreeBSD supports, this section serves as a
catalog of the device drivers included with FreeBSD and the
hardware each drivers supports. Where possible and
appropriate, notes about specific products are included.
As FreeBSD is a volunteer project without a funded testing
department, we depend on you, the user, for much of the
information contained in this catalog. If you have direct
experience of hardware that does or does not work with
FreeBSD, please let us know by sending email to
doc@freebsd.org. Questions about supported hardware
should be directed to questions@freebsd.org (see
for more
information). When submitting information or asking a
question, please remember to specify exactly what version of
FreeBSD you are using and include as many details of your
hardware as possible.
Core/ProcessingMotherboards, busses, and chipsets* ISA* EISA* VLBPCI
Contributed by &a.rgrimes;.25 April 1995.
Of the Intel PCI chip sets the following is a list
of brokenness from worst to best and a short
description of brokenness.
Mercury: Cache coherency problems,
especially if there are ISA bus masters behind
the ISA to PCI bridge chip. Hardware flaw, only
known work around is to turn the cache
off.
Saturn-I (ie, 82424ZX at rev 0, 1 or 2):
Write back cache coherency
problems. Hardware flaw, only known work around
is to set the external cache to write-through
mode. Upgrade to Saturn-II.
Saturn-II (ie, 82424ZX at rev 3 or 4):
Works fine, but many MB
manufactures leave out the external dirty bit
SRAM needed for write back operation. Work
arounds are either run it in write through mode,
or get the dirty bit SRAM installed. (I have
these for the ASUS PCI/I-486SP3G rev 1.6 and
later boards).
Neptune: Can not run more than 2 bus
master devices. Admitted Intel design flaw.
Workarounds include do not run more than 2 bus
masters, special hardware design to replace the
PCI bus arbiter (appears on Intel Altair board
and several other Intel server group MB's). And
of course Intel's official answer, move to the
Triton chip set, we ``fixed it there''.
Triton: No known cache coherency or bus
master problems, chip set does not implement
parity checking. Workaround for parity issue.
Wait for Triton-II.
Triton-II: Unknown, not yet shipping.
* CPUs/FPUs* Memory* BIOSInput/Output Devices* Video cards* Sound cardsSerial ports and multiport cards
The sio driver provides support for NS8250-,
NS16450-, NS16550 and NS16550A-based EIA RS-232C (CCITT
V.24) communications interfaces. Several multiport
cards are supported as well. See the sio(4)
manual page for detailed technical documentation.
Digiboard PC/8
Contributed by &a.awebster;.26 August
1995.
Here is a config snippet from a machine with
digiboard PC/8 with 16550. It has 8 modems connected
to these 8 lines, and they work just great. Do not
forget to add options "COM_MULTIPORT" or it
will not work very well!
device sio4 at isa? port 0x100 tty flags 0xb05
device sio5 at isa? port 0x108 tty flags 0xb05
device sio6 at isa? port 0x110 tty flags 0xb05
device sio7 at isa? port 0x118 tty flags 0xb05
device sio8 at isa? port 0x120 tty flags 0xb05
device sio9 at isa? port 0x128 tty flags 0xb05
device sio10 at isa? port 0x130 tty flags 0xb05
device sio11 at isa? port 0x138 tty flags 0xb05 irq 9 vector siointr
The trick in setting this up is that the MSB of the
flags represent the last SIO port, in this case 11 so
flags are 0xb05.
Boca 16
Contributed by &a.whiteside;.26 August
1995.
The procedures to make a Boca 16 pord board with
FreeBSD are pretty straighforward, but you will need
a couple things to make it work:
You either need the kernel sources installed
so you can recompile the necessary options or
you will need someone else to compile it for you.
The 2.0.5 default kernel does not come with
multiport support enabled and you will need to add
a device entry for each port anyways.
Two, you will need to know the interrupt and IO
setting for your Boca Board so you can set these
options properly in the kernel.
One important note - the actual UART chips for the
Boca 16 are in the connector box, not on the internal
board itself. So if you have it unplugged, probes of
those ports will fail. I have never tested booting with
the box unplugged and plugging it back in, and I
suggest you do not either.
If you do not already have a custom kernel
configuration file set up, refer to for
general procedurs. The following are the specifics
for the Boca 16 board and assume you are using the
kernel name MYKERNEL and editing with vi.
Add the line
options "COM_MULTIPORT"
to the config file.
Where the current device sio
xxx lines are, you will need to add
16 more devices. Only the last device
includes the interrupt vector for the
board. (See the sio(4) manual page
for detail as to why.)
The following example is for a Boca Board with an
interrupt of 3, and a base IO address 100h. The
IO address for Each port is +8 hexidecimal from
the previous port, thus the 100h, 108h, 110h...
addresses.
device sio1 at isa? port 0x100 tty flags 0x1005
device sio2 at isa? port 0x108 tty flags 0x1005
device sio3 at isa? port 0x110 tty flags 0x1005
device sio4 at isa? port 0x118 tty flags 0x1005
[...]
device sio15 at isa? port 0x170 tty flags 0x1005
device sio16 at isa? port 0x178 tty flags 0x1005 irq 3 vector siointr
The flags entry must be changed from
this example unless you are using the exact same
sio assignments. Flags are set according to
0xMYY where M indicates the
minor number of the master port (the last port on
a Boca 16) and YY indicates if FIFO is
enabled or disabled(enabled), IRQ sharing is
used(yes) and if there is an AST/4 compatible IRQ
control register(no).
In this example,
flags 0x1005
indicates that the master port is sio16. If I
added another board and assigned sio17 through
sio28, the flags for all 16 ports on
that board would be 0x1C05, where 1C
indicates the minor number of the master port.
Do not change the 05 setting.Save and complete the kernel configuration,
recompile, install and reboot.
Presuming you have successfully installed the
recompiled kernel and have it set to the correct
address and IRQ, your boot message should
indicate the successful probe of the Boca ports
as follows: (obviously the sio numbers, IO and
IRQ could be different)
sio1 at 0x100-0x107 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio1: type 16550A (multiport)
sio2 at 0x108-0x10f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio2: type 16550A (multiport)
sio3 at 0x110-0x117 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio3: type 16550A (multiport)
sio4 at 0x118-0x11f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio4: type 16550A (multiport)
sio5 at 0x120-0x127 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio5: type 16550A (multiport)
sio6 at 0x128-0x12f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio6: type 16550A (multiport)
sio7 at 0x130-0x137 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio7: type 16550A (multiport)
sio8 at 0x138-0x13f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio8: type 16550A (multiport)
sio9 at 0x140-0x147 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio9: type 16550A (multiport)
sio10 at 0x148-0x14f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio10: type 16550A (multiport)
sio11 at 0x150-0x157 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio11: type 16550A (multiport)
sio12 at 0x158-0x15f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio12: type 16550A (multiport)
sio13 at 0x160-0x167 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio13: type 16550A (multiport)
sio14 at 0x168-0x16f flags 0x1005 on isa
sio14: type 16550A (multiport)
sio15 at 0x170-0x177 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio15: type 16550A (multiport)
sio16 at 0x178-0x17f irq 3 flags 0x1005 on isa
sio16: type 16550A (multiport master)
If the messages go by too fast to see, dmesg
> more will show you the boot
messages.Next, apprepriate entries in /dev for the devices
must be made using the /dev/MAKEDEV
script. After becoming root:
# cd /dev
# ./MAKEDEV tty1
# ./MAKEDEV cua1(everything in between)
# ./MAKEDEV ttyg
# ./MAKEDEV cuag
If you do not want or need callout devices for some
reason, you can dispense with making the cua*
devices.If you want a quick and sloppy way to make
sure the devices are working, you can simply plug
a modem into each port and (as root) echo at
> ttyd* for each device you have
made. You should see the RX lights flash
for each working port.* Parallel ports* Modems* Network cards* Keyboards* Mice* Other* Storage Devices* Disk/tape controllers* SCSI* IDE* Floppy* Hard drives* Tape drives* CD-ROM drives* Other* Other* PCMCIA