Subject: Re: Do YDL support 'foreign' hardware?
From: Charles Lepple (charles@ghz.cc)
Date: Sat May 05 2001 - 20:59:48 MDT
--On Saturday, May 05, 2001 03:33:44 PM -0500 Chris Ruprecht
<chrup@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I know, under MacOS I have the [questionable] pleasure of being unable to
> use some of the strange devices, I have lying around: Adaptec AHA-2940
> dual SCSI adaptor, 3Com 3C905B Ethernet card. Are they supported under
> YDL? I have to admit that I have not tried to plug them in or to read the
By and large, PCI devices that work under x86 Linux "should" work for any
architecture. PCI device drivers in Linux are supposed to call a set of
architecture-independent access functions to get to the hardware itself, so
if things don't work as expected, there may well be a bug or endian-ness
assumption in the code.
I think I remember getting a 3c905 to work intermittently in some 7200-like
Mac (no original parts besides the case) but that was before I started
playing with YDL, and it was before the 2.2 kernel was stable. Plus, the
3c905A had some hardware bugs. YMMV.
> literature. The literature seems to refer mostly to x86 Linux and is of
> no great help (like "to have dual boot, you have to edit lilo.conf..."
> and we all know that's not getting you anywhere on a Mac...
Speaking of booting... you'll probably have to boot off of your internal
SCSI/IDE controller if the Adaptec card doesn't like MacOS.
I'm fairly certain that you can use the Adaptec card. The only difference
between the Mac and PC versions of the AIC-7xxx based Adaptec SCSI cards
(2940 and friends) was the EEPROM program. Basically, if you had a
PC-labeled Adaptec card, a Mac firmware file, and a hacked firmware update
program, you could use the card in MacOS. Last I checked, Linux only uses
the EEPROM for some default settings (autotermination, etc) so you can
probably get that card working.
-- Charles Lepple <charles@ghz.cc> http://ghz.cc/charles/
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