[parisc-linux] PALinux on HP9000/735-125

[Christian Suder]

> 
> > - has someone been able to make the 100mbit EISA-ethernet-card 3c597
work> >   in the HP9000/735 under Linux?
> 
> IMHO no EISA card will work at the moment. During the weekend I tried
> to get an Adapatec 1742 card going in my B132, and the problem is,
> that the pdc doesn't initialize EISA cards. Looks like that is done
> by HPUX. So before any EISA cards will work, we need something like 
> that for Linux, too.
> 

I was trying to get EISA cards working a while ago. The basic problem is,
as Thomas indicated, that the EISA cards need to be configured by a
configuration utility before you can use them. HPUX has a utility called
eisa_config, but there is no equivalent in Linux. Seems all other EISA
platforms (i386, alpha, mips) can be configured by booting a diskette, so
nobody bothered with a linux version yet. 

I think it should work to boot HPUX, get the correct EISA .cfg file and
use the eisa_config utility. The configuration is actually stored in an
eeprom, so it's not tied to the OS. I can't test this though as the only
HPUX CDs I have are too old for the machine.

Another option may be to run the utility on Linux, tried that once but it
complained it could not access /dev/eeprom. A bit scary too, if something
goes wrong one could end up with a corrupt eeprom.... 

	Christian