Subject: Re: m68k comman part (was Re: mips ports ...)
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: None <is@Beverly.Rhein.DE>
List: current-users
Date: 03/20/1996 09:26:54
Guenther Grau (s_grau@ira.uka.de) wrote:

: But the Amiga is the most common m68k-plattform in use for NetBSD and
: it does NOT have any FPE emulation built in, i.e. it is not possible to
: boot NetBSD on an Amiga without FPU. Thus your work is shared beween
: Mac and Atari, but not the Amiga community. Therefore I was not wrong
: or incorrect as you say :-)

The FPE _is_ in the common code. Its just not yet integrated in the
Amiga port. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to do so. I _told_ you on
this list that it is on my work list, and that I have a reason why I've 
put it there (the 040 DraCos use the 68040V, which is, besides being a
3.3V chip, without FPU), so it is pretty sure it'll work some day. I could 
even  _test_ it without changing machines once I see userland on the DraCo 
(its pretty easy to disable the FPU on a 68060 at runtime, without damaging 
the chip :-). 

If you want it earlier, then you'll have to do a first set of patches
(and their Alphatest) yourself, I'm afraid. I'd be happy to glance at
it, but I can't test it right now, or work actively on it.

: I agree qith you that some parts are shared between the ports, but there
: are a lot more things which the ports have in common, for example some
: of the device drivers. I seecomments on the src-changes list like
: Mac: taken 5380-driver from Amiga and modified ...
: Atari: taken 5380-driver from Mac and modified ...
: Mac: Using MI-5380-driver now ...
: Amiga: Modified 5380 driver ...

Yes. And the sbic driver for the Amiga might be usable elsewhere, too.
And some other Emulex driver might work better for the Amiga, the
current one seems to have problems in the state machine.

Its just, especially in the SCSI driver business, not very wise to
change anything that works... the state machine is much more complex
than for a Ethernet interface, and we still wait to see the performance
of the old if_ed driver with the new driver on Hydra boards.
 

Btw, the Amiga port is one of the ports with _many_ shared drivers
(although mostly inside itself). Heck, some of our drivers (well, one,
the "siop" (NCR53C710) is so impressive, that a certain person who works
on PCI stuff mentioned to me he'd might simply throw out the current pci
driver and write a frontend for that... We're not _that_ bad.

Regards,
	Ignatios