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Re: hf/sf [Was Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/misc/raspberrypi-userland]



On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 08:01:15PM +0100, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> 
> I have no indication before I buy a SoC if it is supported by NetBSD. 

I can't see how this, at least, is any worse than it was before.

At the end of the day, either we're going to use the absolute LCD
feature set for any architecture with multiple generations -- which
would leave us running 32-bit MIPS1 code on Octeon, etc. just for the
convenience of having "only one userland MIPS port" or we're going to
have this kind of profusion of ports per CPU family.

It's just a fact of life.  ARM in particular, but also MIPS and to some
extent PowerPC, have far more variants than our old scheme accounted for.
To actually be able to use the features of those variants, there will
have to be many more sets of userland binaries.  We can pretend otherwise,
and get lousy performance and lots of confusion from people building
embedded things that actually need the features, or we can bite the
bullet and admit there really cannot be a single set of "arm" binaries
any longer.

It seems to me this is largely a tempest in a teapot that could be
dealt with by a simple table, somewhere obvious on the web site,
showing the mapping necessary to download a working kernel and
binaries for each common CPU (or SoC).

Thor


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