From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon May 29 9:56:41 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from etinc.com (et-gw.etinc.com [207.252.1.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8481B37BC1D; Mon, 29 May 2000 09:56:35 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dennis@etinc.com) Received: from dbsys (dbsys.etinc.com [207.252.1.18]) by etinc.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id NAA23834; Mon, 29 May 2000 13:00:46 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200005291700.NAA23834@etinc.com> X-Sender: dennis@etinc.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0 Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 13:01:07 -0400 To: Mike Smith From: Dennis Subject: Re: 4.0 - Isa devices not being probed Cc: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven , John Hay , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <200005280136.SAA01669@mass.cdrom.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 06:36 PM 5/27/00 -0700, Mike Smith wrote: >> Existing bus abstractions tend to let think that the same software driver >> can deal with different buses, bridges or IO methods without having to >> care about how these things actually behave, notably regarding buffering >> and ordering rules. This is untrue. > >A good bus abstraction lets you care as much or as little as necessary. >The NetBSD framework (which we use) allows you to do this. The best "portable" coding method is with memory-mapped registers, which seems to have been omitted from this "implementation", which is the gripe here. Perhaps "portable" within the OS was your goal, but in the mean time "portable" between very different OSs has been tainted. After an OS specific initialization, the driver can be completely OS independent (as are our LINUX and FreeBSD drivers) using memory-mapped registers. One of the problems with "free software" is that the big picture is missed because the people writing OS's dont care (and for the most part dont understand) about vendors supporting multiple, very different, OS's. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message