Update on the status of laptops under OpenBSD (fwd)

[Aaron Campbell <aaron@monkey.org>]

Hi. Lots of good things have been happening lately, so I thought I'd send
a message. Here are some notable improvements to OpenBSD since 2.8 with
regards to support on laptops:

1) ESS Maestro 1, 2, and 2E sound chips are now supported.
2) Cirrus Logic CS4281 sound chips are now supported (as found in X20).
3) I/O on CompactFlash cards in cardbus slots no longer hang machine.
4) Can now boot a Sony VAIO Z505 with floppy drive attached.
5) Better CardBus hot insertion/ejection support.

Discussion:

Marc Espie (espie@) wrote the Maestro driver from scratch with
some help from David Leonard (d@). It was committed about two weeks ago.

Support was CS4281 chips was written by Tatoku Ogaito for NetBSD and
ported to OpenBSD by me. At my new job, the IBM ThinkPad X20 is standard
issue, and my workmates were buggering me about sound. :)

With some help from csapuntz@, I pulled a 4am'er figuring out why doing
operations on a CompactFlash card hung the machine at seemingly random
intervals when it was in a CardBus-attached slot (cbb). Turns out two
lines of code were commented out that shouldn't have been.

And the big news: yesterday mickey@ committed some _very_ important
changes for PCIBIOS and the PCI subsystem. If you've ever had a PCI device
"hang" at attach (for example, booting a VAIO Z505 with a floppy attached
usually caused a hang at "fxp0" attach), then update your kernel, this
should be fixed now. This change does not affect laptops only, but should
improve things for all i386-based machines.

As for hot insertion/ejection, mickey's changes seemed to help here,
too. Last night I was popping my WaveLAN and CF card in and out of the
machine frantically, trying to break things, but the interrupt was noticed
every time and when I stopped both were configured properly.

That's all folks: happy laptopping! (PS: someone feel free to submit this
message to www.deadly.org).

---
Aaron Campbell (aaron@monkey.org || aaron@openbsd.org)
http://www.biodome.org/~fx