Re: mutexes, locks and so on...

[Antti Kantee <pooka%cs.hut.fi@localhost>]

On Fri Nov 12 2010 at 15:25:04 +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> >Freeway design is not driven by the requirements of the horse.  If a horse
> >occasionally wants to gallop down a freeway, we're happy to let it as long
> >as it doesn't cause any impediment to the actual users of the freeway.
> >
> >Over 15 years ago NetBSD had a possibility to take everyone into account
> >since everyone was more or less on the same line.  This is no longer true.
> >If old architectures can continue to be supported, awesome, but they may
> >in no way dictate MI design decisions which hold back the capabilities
> >of modern day architectures.
> 
> So what you are arguing is that MI needn't be so much MI anymore, and 
> that supporting anything more than mainstream today is more to be 
> considered a lucky accident than a desired goal?

You can try to twist my words in any way that pleases you.  However, the
fact is that people who put forward a heroic effort in modernizing NetBSD
will not be held accountable for making sure prehistoric architectures
keep up (*).  Some of our older ports have active supporters who keep
the port up to speed with MI changes, set up emulator support, publish
test run results etc.  These ports will continue to be supported by
NetBSD indefinitely.

*) just to be explicit: prehistoric != non-x86