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[It's not clear that this discussion is any longer of general interest,
at least to port-sparc@NetBSD.ORG.  This shall be my last message on the
subject]

On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> If you are porting Linux and do not want to make the changes, it is up
> to you, just take any ports' definitions and use that.  What is the
> problem? 

But the fact that the existing ports have already diverged means that
a lot of source which could be shared among ports cannot, and of easy.
Again : If I want to move kernel code from Linux to Sparc Linux, I have
to rewrite my userland interface and my device interface, so that I fit
into the new system's idea of struct sizes.

If there were a pressing reason to change this, by all means go ahead,
but as you said, it was changed in order to shave a week or two off of
the development time.  I consider this short sighted.

> > No, but it certainly does make it more work, as that code has to be
> > edited to make it work on each port.  By comparison, huge parts of
> > NetBSD's kernel _and_driver_ code are platform independent, and are
> > quite literally shared between all ports which use that device.  
> 
> This is not a limitation of the emulation setup.  This is more a
> consequence of having the NetBSD people doing a nice split of the
> device-specific and port specific parts of a device driver.

Which is made possible by not arbitrarily changing things like syscall
numbering, etc., so that code which is not MD is not randomly changed
between platforms.  We're not perfect with this, but I think we've done
a pretty respectable job of keeping MD'ness to a minimum.

- --
				Jim Wise
				jim.wise@turner.com

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