From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Feb 20 4:33:27 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mycenae.ilion.eu.org (mycenae.ilion.eu.org [203.35.206.129]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 047F537BCAD for ; Sun, 20 Feb 2000 04:33:22 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from patrykz@ilion.eu.org) Received: from mycenae.ilion.eu.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mycenae.ilion.eu.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA04864; Sun, 20 Feb 2000 23:33:10 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from patrykz@mycenae.ilion.eu.org) Message-Id: <200002201233.XAA04864@mycenae.ilion.eu.org> To: Doug Rabson Cc: Arun Sharma , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 64bit OS? In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 20 Feb 2000 12:05:30 -0000." Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 23:33:08 +1100 From: Patryk Zadarnowski Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Patryk Zadarnowski wrote: > > > > On Sun, Feb 20, 2000 at 12:42:14PM +1100, Patryk Zadarnowski wrote: > > > > One more thing about GPTs (I thought I'll leave that till last. ;) > > > > Jochen Liedtke holds a German patent on them, although he will > > > > probably be fairly easily convinced to give FreeBSD rights to use > > > > them. I'll be happy to ask (if we're interested.) > > > > > > It looks like the hardware has to implement GPTs and know how to > > > walk them. How can FreeBSD use them without hardware support ? > > > > No it doesn't. We've got software GPT implementations for both MIPS64 and > > Alpha, and they're both peform very well in our somewhat hostile SASOS > > conditions. > > So you have custom PALcode for Alpha on SASOS? We have been able to use > OSF1 PALcode up to now which makes life a lot easier for supporting new > hardware. Sure. Mungi (our SASOS) runs on top of an L4 microkernel. If anything, it improves portability: porting Mungi from MIPS to Alpha took literally few hours of working out endianess-related bugs ;) (tell me the same about FreeBSD ;P Of course using OSF1 PALcode simplifies life for FreeBSD, but it's really not an option for our OS research. Pat. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message