[Coco] V.PAGE

[Chuck Youse]

On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 12:48 -0400, Robert Gault wrote:

> 
> Auto-probing is not dangerous if done with correct coding. 

When you start poking around at registers without knowing what exactly
is there, you have NO idea what the results might be.  If I think
there's a UART at a given address and it's in fact an IDE controller,
the side effects can be harmful.

ISA auto-probing was pretty hit-or-miss back before PCI took over the
world.  I can cite a large set of cases where system initializations
simply failed (and systems would hang) because auto-probing isn't safe.
The solutions were invariably "turn off autoprobing for X".

C.