On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Ken Seefried wrote:

> 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. 

So far, I haven't noticed any code committed in the direction of
arm26/arm32 code sharing that wasn't my work, so most of the diversion of
effort is from native arm26 work, rather than from anything that would
help NetBSD/arm32.  I am, admittedly, using some of Chris Gilbert's time
for testing ELF support on arm32, but arm32 needs ELF support anyway.  I
hope (and believe) that the gains to arm32 from my working on improving
the shared code will outweigh the costs.

> 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).

I don't think that trying to shoehorn the Risc PC and Archimedes into a
single MACHINE is a good idea.  While they share some peripherals, the
core hardware is fundamentally different.  I can't really comment on the
idea of splitting arm32 in two, though I'd suspect that the differences
between the various non-Risc-PC arm32 platforms are at least as great as
those between them and the Risc PC.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/arm26               <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/arm26/>