> The theory is that those drivers are written in an architecture independant
> fashion and each port just has to implement the correct glue to interface
> with the bus and suddenly a whole load of drivers should "just work".

Right.

Unfortunately, the theory isn't very close to the reality, for most of
the drivers.  However, that's slowly improving.


For instance, on the Alpha, we can use (i.e. they've been tested by
somebody) the machine-independent drivers for:

	tc bus
		'le'
		'fta'

	pci bus
		'de'
		'fpa'
		'ncr'
		'ppb'

	eisa bus
		'fea'

	isa bus 
		'com'
		'lpt'

As you can see, that's relatively few of the machine-independent
drivers for those busses (esp. the latter), but it's _way_ better than
none!



chris