Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

What can I do about a 
not configured
 device?
●
If the device or card you are seeing is not one you need, you can safely ignore the "
not 
configured
" devices, they will not hurt your system. Some "special purpose" devices are 
deliberately left unconfigured so the system's BIOS will handle them. 
●
In some cases, it is just a variation of an already supported device, in which case, it may be 
relatively easy for a developer to add support for the new card. In other cases, it may be a totally 
unsupported chip set or implementation (such as the above examples). In that case, a new driver 
would have to be written, which may not even be possible if the device is not fully documented. 
You are certainly welcome to write a driver for the device yourself. 
●
If you are running an install kernel, the device may not be supported by the install media you 
used, but may be supported by a different boot disk. This is a common issue with users of some 
popular SCSI cards who misread the footnotes on the 
i386 platform page
and try all the boot 
floppies their SCSI card is NOT supported on, rather than the one that it is supported on. 
●
If you are running a modified kernel, you may have removed support for a device you now need. 
In general, removing devices from a kernel is a 
bad idea
. This is one reason why. 
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq12.html (3 of 12)9/4/2011 10:02:18 AM

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12 - Hardware and Platform-Specific Questions
●
Before reporting a "
not configured
" device, make sure you have first tested the most recent 
snapshot
, as support may already have been added, and check the 
mail list archives
to see if the 
issue has been discussed already. Remember, however, if you are using an older version of 
OpenBSD, you will generally have to upgrade to get the benefit of any new driver written.