> It's the 3Com that baffles me. I suspect the two-stage boot (I know > dangerously little about 9front's boot process) somehow fails to pick > up a supported device (3c905b - etherelink3).
is this the amd64 kernel or 386 one? the amd64 one does not include the etherelnk3 driver. the reason is that the amd64 kernel shares its drivers with the pc kernel, but not all drivers might be ready for 64 bit pointers. so we only include what we can test and verify. you can try to add the etherelnk3 line to the pc64 config and rebuild. if you have this issue with the 386 kernel, then knowing the pci device id would be a start. the boot process is nothing special. we have a bootloader that loads the kernel. the loader uses BIOS/EFI calls to get the kernel from the boot media so that it does not need drivers. once the kernel is taking over, it needs a driver. -- cinap
