[geeks] IPCop and pfSense...

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 15:43 -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> My company is in the same boat.
> 
> The guys I'm working with need to boot from CF cards on little  
> adapters, and FreeBSD keeps kernel panicking because the "drive" says  
> it can do DMA, but it can't and the kernel goes nuts.
> 
> We could force them to use PIO, but not all BIOS let's you do that at  
> boot, and it seems silly that you can't easily determine what to buy  
> for full DMA support.
> 
> I wonder too, do all CF cards support DMA and it is just the adapter  
> that is the issue, or does it require a certain revision of the CF  
> standard too?

I don't know why the adapter would matter at all.  The CF adapters I
have here are completely passive devices.

I think that some CF cards don't support DMA at all, and some CF cards
have busted DMA support.

However, I hate using CF cards and I really want to move to those IDC
header modules.  I'd feel better if the CF card mounted on the
motherboard, like was originally be supposed to be supported on the SBCs
I'm using (there is a CF port, but you can't use it.  Grr).  But running
an IDE cable to a seperate CF adapter, and drilling the metal work to
mount it internally is oh so very ugly.