Standard sbc and pcm support in GENERIC kernel?

[Helge Oldach]

Daniel O'Connor:
>On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 19:06, Helge Oldach wrote:
>> The issue with kldloading is that you still need PNPBIOS for many
>> on-board sound devices. Which means that you need to compile your own
>> kernel anyway, or don´t you?
>
>I don't think I've ever seen a motherboard/BIOS where you HAD to
>compile it in the kernel..

I have a number of Compaq DeskPro EN K450 here. Rather decent machines
for FreeBSD desktops, and for sure not uncommon hardware. But
unfortunately the stupid Compaq BIOS doesn't have a knob to turn off
PnP, so I have to rely on PNPBIOS to deal with what the Compaq BIOS had
detected.

With PNPBIOS:

FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <ESS 1869 DSP> at io 0x220 irq 5 drq 1:0 bufsz 4096 (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)

Without PNPBIOS: no pcm0.

Latest BIOS revision, of course.

>I don't see why kldload'ing is different to static compilation WRT
>calling the BIOS..

It's not. But without PNPBIOS either won't work on these boxes.

Helge