On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Matthew Browne wrote:

> At 12:02 PM +0900 on 6/22/99, Keiki_Sunagawa@yokogawa.co.jp wrote:
> >
> >I think the machines that have OF and haven't are different enough
> >to support separately.  Since early PowerPC Macs without OF are
> >similar to 68k Macs than ones have OF in hardware design, sharing
> >divice driver on both type of PowerPC Macs is harder.
> 
> Well I'm only just finding my way round the sources but it seems to
> me that this is sensible. There are just so many places that would
> need changes to support the NuBus machines. One shared driver
> that comes to mind is the Valkyrie video chip, available on both
> NuBus systems and PCI systems. In the mac68K sources this is
> detected as an obio device but the roughly equivalent code in the
> macppc sources assumes Open Firmware support currently.
> 
> It could be changed but I think the kernel would grow quite
> substantially.

Not necessarily. Obviously new, non-shared drivers would mean growth. But
for sharable drivers, we'd just need platform-specific attach routines.

What we're talking about is a lot like what port-i386 has been through
with isa, eisa, and pci drivers for cards. If we do it right, it's not
that bad. :-)

If we think it's hard, we'll do stuff in such a way that it is hard. :-)

Take care,

Bill