Hello everyone, 

it appears that there may be a way to misinterpret
the man page for boot_config(8) in the state of
commit 0b249e2164be2385bc6a5e82814435649b2b06e0
Date:   Sun Jan 24 10:21:43 2021 +0000
on the github openbsd src mirror.

The problem description is under the headline
"Issue".

There is a realistic chance that I am
misunderstanding something. If this is the case, what
further measures can I take to narrow down the problem?

=== Issue ===

The boot_config(8) man page reads:

[quote]
The Ethernet card is not detected at boot because the
kernel configuration does not match the physical
hardware configuration, e.g.  wrong IRQ in
OpenBSD/i386.  [...]
UKC> find ne
[...]
25 ne1 at isa0 port 0x300 size 0 iomem -1 iosiz 0 irq 10 drq -1 drq2 -1 flags 
0x0
[...]
ne1 seems to match the configuration except it uses
IRQ 5 instead of IRQ 10. 
[...]
UKC> change ne1
[...]
irq [10] ? 5
[\quote]

Note, that the line that is longer than 72 characters
in this email is also longer than 72 characters in
the original manual page. I selfishly chose a more
accurate quote of the manual page over breaking the
line. Plese let me know, in case this is a serious
problem. Maybe https://www.openbsd.org/report.html
should be augmented to refer to this specific
quotation problem, in case it is important enough to
document properly.

The sentence "ne1 seems to match the configuration
except it uses IRQ 5 instead of IRQ 10" has two
ways of being interpreted: (1) the kernel
configuration is using IRQ 5 and (2) the hardware
configuration is using IRQ 5.

After having misunderstood the sentence by assuming
meaning (1) and noticing the inconsintency with the
other relevant lines in the above quote of the man
page, I suggest clarifying the sentence like so
(change marked with square brackets):
"ne1 seems to match the configuration except it [is
supposed to use] IRQ 5 instead of IRQ 10" .

One even more explicit option is:
"ne1 [in the kernel configuration] seems to match
[the hardware] configuration except [for the IRQ
being used. The kernel currently uses IRQ 10 and the
hardware uses IRQ 5, so the kernel configuration
needs to be adjusted to match the hardware
configuration.]"

I want to thank the tireless efforts which have gone
and are currently going into maintaining the
exceptionally high documentation standards of
OpenBSD. In case my suggestions above are overly
pedantic, I sincerely apologize.



=== Affected Man Page File ===
<github-src-mirror-root>/share/man/man8/boot_config.8
in 
commit 0b249e2164be2385bc6a5e82814435649b2b06e0
Date:   Sun Jan 24 10:21:43 2021 +0000



Thank you very much for your time.


Kind regards,
Andrew Easton

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