List of (potentially) fe compatible boards

The following is a list of boards which are known to be potentially compatible with fe driver, i.e., those which are either known to work fine with fe, or not known to work but there are some reason the author believes it does.

See below for explanation of the table format.

Keys

Model

The model name of a board, as seen on the package. When a board in the list is known to be an OEM product of another, the table shows both names (one for OEM brand's and another for original manufacturer's.)

Vendor

The name of the vendor of which a board is sold as a product. It is listed with the name the auther believes is used most frequently.

Bus type

The bus type lists what type of bus (connector) is used to plug the board into a PC.

ISA

16 bit I/O slot available on AT compatible PCs.

ISA PnP

Modern ISA slot with automatic resource (I/O address and IRQ number) allocation.

XT

8 bit I/O slot available on AT compatible PCs or older 8088 based PCs.

EISA

32 bit slot which is upward-compatible with ISA, usually seen on server-class machines.

MCA

32 bit slot on IBM PS/2 series.

PC card

ISA-compatible (no CardBus) PC card slot defined by PCMCIA 2.x and JEIDA 4.x spec.

CFA

Compact FLASH size I/O cards.

CBUS

Traditional 16 bit slot available on NEC PC9801 compatible desktops.

98 note

110 pin external I/O connector available on early models of NEC PC9801 compatible laptops.

98DRC

NEC proprietary, PC card sized (but not compatible) extension slot available on a few of early NEC PC9801 laptops.

NIC

The NIC column shows the name of the Ethernet controller LSI on the board.

Media

The media column lists media directly supported by a board, separated by slash.

Status

The status column shows the development status of the fe driver for a board. The contents fall into several types.

• If the column shows a version number of a FreeBSD release, the board is supported with the fe driver included in that version of FreeBSD.
• If the column shows either "(PAO)" or "(98)," the board requires PAO package or FreeBSD(98) to work, respectively.
• If the column shows "Dev" or "Test," support for the board is under development. "Test" means some sort of code is ready for testing (although it may not be known the code works properly.) "Dev" means earlier stage then "Test."
• If the column shows "NP," no effort to support the board is in progress.

IRQ

The IRQ column shows the fe driver's handling of IRQ setting for the board.

manual

The board's IRQ must be properly set (e.g., by inserting/removing jumper) before starting FreeBSD. The IRQ value must be specified on the kernel config file explicitly. Auto IRQ probe does not work for this board.

auto

The board's IRQ must be properly set (e.g., by DOS-based configuration utility come with the board) before starting FreeBSD. You may write exact IRQ number on the kernel config file, or you may write "irq ?" to activate auto IRQ probe function.

set

The IRQ value the board should use must be written on the kernel config file explicitly. The fe driver sets up the board to use the IRQ upon initialization.

ext

The IRQ is handled externally, (e.g., handled by PCIC chip,) and the fe driver has nothing to do with.

part

This is a mixture of manual and auto. The IRQ must be set accordingly with the instruction in the board's manual. The auto IRQ probe works on some selected IRQ setting; i.e., some IRQ settings can be detected by the fe driver. However, some others can't. Hence, it is safe to specify IRQ value explicitly in the kernel config file always for the boards of this type. The only boards which fall into this type is RATOC REX-5586/5587.

Probed as

The "Probed as" column shows the text string the fe driver reports the board as after the hardware probe. The information is based on the latest version of the fe driver and may be different in earlier versions.