Re: Path to kmods

[Christoph Egger <Christoph_Egger%gmx.de@localhost>]

Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 08:58:37AM +0000, Andrew Doran wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 05:54:14PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

>>> But I suspect things like device drivers can't be shared because some
>>> includes part of the kernel ABI are different (in interrupt or bus_space
>>> areas for example).
>> bus_space and bus_dma on x86 are module friendly. Most everything is a
>> function call. There could potentiall be problems with some macros and
>> inlines in intr.h but that should be easy to fix. I haven't checked over
>> the xen headers.

The x86 interrupt code needs a complete rework. The xen interrupt code
must be able to coexist with any native interrupt code if we ever want
to have NetBSD with paravirtualized drivers as Xen HVM guest.

>>> FWIW, linux has different module sets for native and Xen kernels,
>>> and they use different uname -r. I wonder if we should also have different
>>> uname -r for amd64/i386 and xen, or use something else (uname -m ?) for
>>> it. But changing uname -p may break third-party software builds ...
>> I disagree. Rather than succumb to uncertainty and deal with an increasing
>> number of permutations I think we should focus on fixing compatibility
>> issues as they are identified.
> 
> would you say that modules should be the same between say, amiga and mac68k ?
> native and xen kernels are really different and should have a different
> uname -m. I really don't think we can make modules sharable across different
> machines without increased complexity and execution cost.

I agree.

Christoph