Subject: Re: Mac68k/Sun3 binary/lib compatibility
To: Gordon W. Ross <gwr@mc.com>
From: David Brownlee <david@mono.org>
List: port-sun3
Date: 04/04/1996 17:08:29
On Thu, 4 Apr 1996, Gordon W. Ross wrote:

> They can share most binaries, with the following exceptions:
> (Well, these are the ones I know about anyway.)
>
> bin/ps
> sbin/dmesg
> sbin/savecore
> usr/sbin/kvm_mkdb
> usr/lib/libkvm.a
> usr/lib/libkvm.so.4.0
> usr/lib/libkvm_p.a
> usr/lib/libkvm_pic.a
> usr/bin/gdb
>
	disklabel, installboot & ccdconfig also spring to mind :)

> Once we all get around to porting Leo's new libkvm to the sun3,
> we should be able to remove the remaining things in usr/* from
> the above list.  That would let us share /usr between any m68k
> machines, which is a great convenience.  I'm not so concerned
> about trying to share things in /bin or /sbin because it would
> not save much space, and there ARE still some truly machine-
> dependent programs, like eeprom for the sun3, ite* on amiga...
>
	On the other hand it would be _wonderful_ to have NetBSD/m68k
	with just the kernels (and maybe a handful of special files)
	unique for each architecture.... (IMHO :)

	The real win for this would be all the packages & userland
	programs would explictly be for NetBSD/m68k (I know they can
	be shared at the moment, but if 'uname' reported m68k as the
	architecture and everything was always referred to as 'm68k'
	then it makes things much nicer) (Apologies to the hp300 :)

> We might even want to put all MD programs in /bin or /sbin just
> to facilitate sharing /usr between, say sun3, amiga, mac68k...
>
	As long as the MD programs are unique between machines (ie
	no two machine have an 'iteconfig' which is different for eac
	machine), and the MD programs do not have any nasty side
	effects when run on the wrong machine (ie eeprom doesn't crash
	an amiga), then everything can be shared. (/dev is another
	problem)

> [..Good info from gwr..]

                   David/abs             (david@mono.org)

+44 181 888 8949 System Manager, Southern Studios Ltd, Box 59, London N22 1AR
 >=- OpenBSD http://www.openbsd.org. Free un*x for {sparc,i386,m68k,...} -=<
       <<< Monochrome - Largest UK Internet BBS - telnet mono.org >>>