From: "Robert White" <rwhite@casabyte.com>
To: <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: PNP Support for PCI bus
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 17:00:27 -0800
Message-ID: <PEEPIDHAKMCGHDBJLHKGOEPCCBAA.rwhite@casabyte.com>
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Greetings,

Someone just brought me a laptop (Toshiba Satellite 5205-S505) that does not
allow you to access the BIOS.  It has a one question setup "reset defaults
(Y/N)?".  They wanted me to put Linux on the beast.

The thing is, the inaccessible bios is strictly plug and pray.

The (2.4.18) kernel contains a plug-and-pray enumerator for the ISA bus, but
not the PCI bus.

Is anybody working on this (or does it already exist) somewhere?  It would
seem that such a beast "would only" have to do what the bios does (populate
registers in the chipset to define INT#A through INT#D) with otherwise
unused values. (I love it when people use any variant of "couldn't you just"
in a requirements proposal don't you? 8-)

My immediate patch was to send the guy back to the store to exchange the
laptop for something that didn't suck.

Meanwhile I suspect that we are going to be seeing more of this sort of
thing.  While I have time to contribute I have now exhausted my knowledge of
PCI internals, so rather than adding something to make me look even more
stupid I will just pose the question... (I'm an application-level
programmer... 8-)

Rob.

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