On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778) [SPP,ECP,ECPPS2]
This is a normal diagnostic, simply indicating that the parallel port driver
(parport) found a PC-style (as opposed to Sun, etc.) parallel port at base
address 0x378 hex. The letters in brackets indicate capabilities. SPP is
"Standard Parallel Port", and is pretty much universal. ECP is "Enhanced
Capabilities Port", and uses DMA -- it is designed for parallel-port Zip
drives and the like.
> parport0: detected irq 7; use procfs to enable interrupt-driven operation.
This indicates that the parallel port driver suspects the port supports
interrupt driven operation using IRQ7. You can enable interrupt-driven
operation by writing the interrupt number to the appropriate node in the proc
filesystem, e.g.:
echo 7 > /proc/parport/0/irq
> lp0: using parport0 (polling).
This indicates the parallel port driver is using polled, as opposed to
interrupt-driven, operation. IRQ auto-detection can go wrong with horrible
results, so polled is the default. See above for how to change to
interrupt-driven mode.
Polling the parallel port controller for status updates does use some CPU
time, but I believe it is fairly insignificant. YMMV.
> cat uses obsolete /proc/pci interface
The /proc/pci interface is depreciated and will go away in some future
revision of the Linux kernel (replaced by the /proc/bus/pci branch). The
kernel prints a warning whenever a program accesses this node, with the name
of the program in question. Unfortunately, in this case, the program was
"cat", doubtless called by some shell script or system utility. You will have
to hunt it down yourself if you are worried about it. Using "grep /proc/pci"
on directories like /etc/rc.d may help.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Net Technologies, Inc. <http://www.ntisys.com>
Voice: (800)905-3049 x18 Fax: (978)499-7839
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