In article <388f47bb.2741...@news.freeserve.co.uk>, Graham Cox says...
On Sat, 22 Jan 2000 20:10:57 +0200, "Chris Becke" <chr...@mvps.org
Gave forth this really invaluable piece of information:
So:
(a) Linux *does* in fact use drivers then?
Yes
Every OS will have to use drivers, if it wants to be even slightly
compatible to future hardware.
(b) if those drivers are broken you are in exactly the same boat - the OS
doesn't work.
No. If the drivers are broken then nothing happens with them, but the
OS still works.
Or, you could fix them.
(Almost) all Linux drivers come with the source code. You don't have to
wait 6 months for some company to fix it - you can do it yourself it you
want to.
(c) So, Linux has drivers for the Matrox G400 Max built right in does it!?
Not as such. The drivers for it are part of the X server for the
Matrox card, and I know that for a fact.
You need to know the settings, because lets face it, PnP doesn't work,
and that's it.
Good grief. How exactly does PnP "not work". And were not talking legacy ISA
devices here. PCI and other modern bus architectures are PnP based.
Again, this was from memory from something I read. PnP was designed to
make ISA cards easy to install, because the PCI and other stuff
already had it. When implemented into the ISA bus, it didn't work well
as it was coded. The idea's were there, but the way they were handled
didn't work.
Yes, and most of the problems with ISA-PNP came from older programs not
being as flexible - they couldn't use the automatically allocated IRQ's
for example because they simply didn't have an option for it. PCI was
built around PNP support, and there it works really well - as long as the
hardware follows the specifications, but these violations are becoming
rarer and rarer.
PnP under Linux works - but you have to allocate the resources yourself.
That's something that will presumably be much better in the 2.4.x
kernels.
I'm sorry, but PnP works, and works great.
Then you have been very lucky, by not having to combine it with older
cards, or by only using software that knows how to handle it.
It *can* work, but there is no guarantee that it will.
If you are stuck using legacy ISA devices - well I'm sorry for you. It is,
however just as easy to install the drivers and set the resources manually
on windows as it is on Linux.
Sorry. I was talking about the ISA version of PnP, because I didn't
think about PCI using the same term. Plug 'n' Play is designed for PCI
and later, where the data like ports isn't hard coded. It is not
designed for things like old ISA sound cards where you change this by
moving jumpers, but this is how windows handles it, and it doesn't
work too well.
Yes, actually, for ISA cards I prefer to use non-PNP cards because I
*know* they will work because I have an option to move a jumper to make
them work.
OTOH, PCI PNP works everywhere, Linux doesn't have any problems. Only
Win2000 coupled with ACPI does strange things to it - like completely
rearranging the IRQ's every time you boot. (Or have they fixed that
yet?)
--
Josef Drexler |
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