Someone just brought me a laptop (Toshiba Satellite 5205-S505) that does not
allow you to access the BIOS. It has a one question setup "reset defaults
(Y/N)?". They wanted me to put Linux on the beast.
The thing is, the inaccessible bios is strictly plug and pray.
The (2.4.18) kernel contains a plug-and-pray enumerator for the ISA bus, but
not the PCI bus.
Is anybody working on this (or does it already exist) somewhere? It would
seem that such a beast "would only" have to do what the bios does (populate
registers in the chipset to define INT#A through INT#D) with otherwise
unused values. (I love it when people use any variant of "couldn't you just"
in a requirements proposal don't you? 8-)
My immediate patch was to send the guy back to the store to exchange the
laptop for something that didn't suck.
Meanwhile I suspect that we are going to be seeing more of this sort of
thing. While I have time to contribute I have now exhausted my knowledge of
PCI internals, so rather than adding something to make me look even more
stupid I will just pose the question... (I'm an application-level
programmer... 8-)
Rob.
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