On Wednesday 14 February 2001  2:49 am, Ken Seefried wrote:
> Chris Gilbert writes:
> > However I believe that arm hardware may have a lot more
> > in common than other platforms, especially arm26 and arm32 on the RISC-OS
> > running systems.
>
> Playing a bit of devils advocate...

Nothing wrong with that :)

> That seems to assume (and I have no wish to put words in anyones mouth)
> that most NetBSD+ARM users are running a RISC-OS type machine.  I don't
> know if that is true.  I, for one, am working with ARM7 & StrongARM class
> processors in embedded systems (i.e. they don't look anything like a
> RISC-OS machine). I suspect that with the vast profusion of ARM6, ARM7 &
> StrongARM based devices out there, that the real future of the NetBSD/ARM
> port ultimately lies there.

I'm not denying that, I'm just suggesting their should be 1 mailing list,  
The future for ARM's is more likely to be mobile devices, embedded devices, 
and whatever Xscale gets used for.  Risc-OS is certainly a smaller market 
place, however it's the hardware that most people associate with arm devices. 
 If we've got arm26 and arm32 then we might as well have armT when someone 
starts porting to thumb devices.  (anyone fancy netbsd in there Epoc device :)

Hmm, SMP Xscale boards anyone :)  (however that'd take a lot of work to pull 
the kernel core up to a level to support smp on the arm.)

> Personally, I find the current fad to divert effort to merge support for
> arm26 interesting & quaint, but ultimately (for me) irrelevant.  Before one
> reads too much into that, I *strongly* encourage continued support for the
> old platforms.  I've got NetBSD/VAX on a VS3100m40, after all.

The effort is to provide support for ELF across all arm platforms.  Bearing 
in mind that this will bring ELF onto arm32 I see that as a plus.  Currently 
Ben seems to be doing a fair amount of work on this front (I believe that 
others would help but lack the time, knowledge or other commitments stops 
them), and he's the arm26 port-master.  Perhaps you've also missed the fact 
that ben has done some improvements to both the arm32 and arm26 ports to 
actually merge them together.

> Just a thought, but perhaps there needs to be an arm/riscos (or some such)
> branch for older platforms (are there any non-Acorn arm26 platforms other
> than the oddball arm26 eval board that I saw on eBay a few months back?),
> and an arm32 branch for the more modern stuff (say, non-RISC-OS ARM6 and
> above).

For what purpose, I've seen no sign of any new architectures being merged 
into the main NetBSD tree, I believe that someone has SA1100's running 
NetBSD, and there maybe other devices.  There's been talk of moving the 
different architectures into their own sys/arch/ dir.  But nothing concrete 
has actually happened.

> This would be much like the various (6, at least) Motorola 68K or
> MIPS (5, I think) NetBSD ports that rely heavily on one another for their
> core kernel functionality (MMU, FP, etc.) and toolchain, but don't make
> comprimises on peripheral support for their given target.  Hell...there are
> currently 4 branches for the Hitachi Super-H processor!

Yes and they've all got a central mailing list, port-sh3 and port-m68k, and 
in a similair vain to this I'm suggesting that we should have a port-arm list 
for the generic stuff, eg binary X doesn't compile, here's a cool 
optimisation for Y.  Anyone tried porting to the Ipaq? 

> I wouldn't want things to get this fragmented, however.  I don't think
> there are enough folks to support more than two branches.

I personally don't see enough to support more than one, however that could be 
due to the lack of work on the arm32 branch until recently.  arm32 lacks an 
active port-master, I believe that Mark is very busy these days, I can't 
remember the last time I actually saw an email from him though, Neil's still 
around, but again busy.  However we probably don't have anyone with the 
knowledge that Mark had to be port-master.

Perhaps ben should be considering if we wants to merge with a port that's not 
been seriously worked on for at least a year?  If you look at the current 
state of mainline there's 2 platforms where the current kernel fails to run, 
it runs out of VM space.  There's a patch for this sat in the PR system, 
along with some other patches from Mike to do with networking.

Most people aren't interested in the NetBSD/arm32 port now, linux is the one 
with all the hype and all the cool new toys ported to.  Having said that 
though we still sell a few CD's at shows.  They recently announced they've 
got linux/arm running on an xscale eval board, they've got ipaq support etc  
At one time NetBSD/arm was ahead of linux in it's support for hardware.  At 
one time we even had boards that were ahead of Risc-Os.  The CATS added PCI 
etc to a SA, and now 2-3 years later we've got companies doing RISC-OS 
systems based around similair hardware.

Hmm, this seems to have turned into a personal moan about the state of the 
arm32 port, which wasn't my intent, but perhaps just me showing that I'm 
frustrated with the current state of things.

Cheers,
Chris