calling fpa and fea users

[Rink Springer]

Hi Brooks,

>  - Using these drivers to connect to a real, production FDDI network
>  - Are running FreeBSD 5.3+ or will be in the near future

Well, I use fpa(4) as a crosslink between my two boxes. Not really
production-wise, but I do enjoy the fact that they can be dual-attached.
Which is why I would't enjoy them being removed.

> Every time I look at these drivers, their massive collection of
> "portability" ifdefs makes it quite difficult to decipher the code.
> Virtually all changes to these drivers in the last eight years have
> been mechanical API updates.  During this time, FDDI has become totally
> obsolete.  Unless someone is running these drivers for real on a modern
> version of FreeBSD I would like to remove them from 6.0 and stop wasting
> my time on them.

If you could tell me where to begin, I'd like to try to make them more
readible / maintainable. I've done some poking around (fpa(4) doesn't always
attach correctly for me, due to some DMA issues) but without the proper data
sheets, I guess it'll be hard to figure out where the problem lies.

If anyone has data sheets for these cards, I'd be willing to bring them
to a more maintainable level. I agree the code is a bit hard to decipher
due to all the #ifdef's, I could work on getting rid of these
alltogether.

However, in order to fix the attachment problem (fpa0: Initialization
failure, which I always get on some machines) I figure I'd need more
detailed information. Perhaps someone can help me out on that?

-- 
Rink P.W. Springer                                - http://rink.nu
"God, root, what is difference?"                  - Pitr, Userfriendly
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