Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 30 May 1998 12:00:16 +0100 (BST)
From:      Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com>
To:        Matt Thomas <matt@3am-software.com>
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD/alpha status report (2)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980530115823.15699a-100000@herring.nlsystems.com>
In-Reply-To: <199805301053.GAA05668@tecumseh.altavista-software.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, 30 May 1998, Matt Thomas wrote:

> At 03:16 AM 5/30/98 , Doug Rabson wrote:
> 
> >I am not saying that there won't be a <machine/bus.h>.  I am saying that I
> >don't think that all the chipset implementations need to implement it.  If
> >I do a bus_space interface, I expect that it will be something like
> >i386/include/bus.h.  It is possible that TurboChannel and TurboLaser boxes
> >with multiple PCI busses might provide their own implementation rather
> >than the generic one.
> 
> That's misguided.  The point of the bus_space and bus_dma is to hide
> the mechanics of the underlying bus from the driver.  Even if the bus
> is simple, the point is to abstract it (so you would have a simple
> abstraction).  As an example, I recently moved the DEC FDDI driver
> to bus_dma (it already used in bus_space) which allowed me to get it
> running under NetBSD/pmax but only fixing coherency bugs.  This means
> this drivers is known to work on 3 difference architectures and 3
> different buses.  This would be almost impossible without bus_space
> and bus_dma.  In a week or two, I should be able to confirm it works
> under NetBSD/arm32.

Why is it misguided?  Drivers which use bus_space will see the same set of
functions.  Alpha chipsets for modern cpus with dense i/o space will use
the trivial implementation of bus_space.

Legacy drivers which use inb etc (we have quite a few) will work.

--
Doug Rabson				Mail:  dfr@nlsystems.com
Nonlinear Systems Ltd.			Phone: +44 181 951 1891
					Fax:   +44 181 381 1039


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.95q.980530115823.15699a-100000>