problem with vr0

[James Frazer]

Oooh, the dreaded vr driver, coming back to haunt us all again.

A couple years ago when I put FreeBSD on my VIA EPIA800 box the darned 
vr driver would always crap out with watchdog timeout errors, 
essentially killing the connection.  I somehow managed to get all my 
important files on to the machine before this problem became a problem 
-- getting them off (no cdrom or floppy) became my worst nightmare.

The VIA mobo cd supposedly had an updated driver but it wouldn't compile 
-- I remember pulling out all my hair and searching newsgroups for days 
finding nothing of value.  I was borderlining insanity by time I figured 
out how to fix it -- with a one liner -- just had to update a single 
depreciated function call.

I sent my fix back to VIA but they were hesitent to add it for 'legal' 
reasons.  I later found out from one of the FreeBSD guys that the VIA 
driver was just a rip off of the FreeBSD vr driver in the first place 
(so much for their legal reasons).

Fortunately a later release of FreeBSD fixed most vr problems for me, 
although, I must admit it's always been a bit flakey.

Just thought this story was appropriate :-)



--James



walt wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, George Georgalis wrote:


Just occurs to me. I've never heard of modules in BSD. Do they exist?
Is the vr0 driver something that can be compiled, added and removed
without rebooting?


Sure.  Man {kldload, kldunload, kldstat}.

# locate if_vr.ko
/modules/if_vr.ko
I wish I knew enough to fix the code myself, but :o(