pcmcia on freebsd

[Nate Williams]

> : > with what version of freebsd do pcmcia network cards work?
> : 
> : PCMCIA PCcards (16 bit) worked starting with V4.3, I think.
> 
> The ze driver was in 3.0, which supported NE-2000 pcmcia cards.  By
> about 3.2 base FreeBSD supported it.  By about 3.4 or so had most of
> the PAO support merged in.

I wasn't going to jump in, but felt it was import for historical
accuracy.


FreeBSD 2.2.1 had the beginnings of Andrew's work (the original PCMCIA
author) merged, and PHK merged in many of the PAO changes into 2.2.4.  I
merged in lots of things, and actually had two dozen different cards
working in 2.2.6, and by 2.2.8 hot-swap 'mostly' worked for the set of
existing drivers, partly due to PAO code, and partly due to my work.
I've still got a dozen or so 3C589[ABCD] network cards, along with
various NE2000 clones and various modems lying around that still work on
the old laptops that I use on newer laptops today because they 'just
work'.

However, no dual-function cards worked at all, as you could only get a
single function card to work (it was a crap shoot as to which function
actually worked).

Luckily, Warner took things over FreeBSD 3, and due to his hard-work and
knowledge of the new bus framework (necessary for PCI and such, which
PCCARD is related to), he was able to work through much of the
hacks/kludges that were made over the years to make things work, such
that by FreeBSD 4 he was now able to make multi-cards work, as well as
provide a much better framework for removable drivers and modules.

The work I did in the FreeBSD 2.2 was really a hack to try and make
PCMCIA (ie; ISA) drivers removable.  It worked, and sometimes even
worked well.  Ironically, my ThinkPads running FreeBSD 2.2.8 were able
to do perform reliable card swaps, along with
hibernation/suspend/resume, which many of the newer laptops *still*
can't due due.  Most of the problems are due to ACPI being harder to
implement than APM, so many of today's BIOS's are extremely buggy as
compared to their counter-parts using APM years ago....




Nate