Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 17:54:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Curt Sampson <cjs@portal.ca> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: seifert@sequent.com, alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PALcode Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.02.9810131751200.10992-100000@ascetic.portal.ca> In-Reply-To: <199810140021.RAA19183@usr08.primenet.com>
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On Wed, 14 Oct 1998, Terry Lambert wrote: > The point which I was trying to make is that anything that spans the > entire hardware line by default is going to be a better basis for > an OS that tries to span the entire hardware line than anything > that doesn't. It depends on what you want the OS to look like. If you don't mind it looking nothing like Unix, then yes, you're correct. However, I don't believe that that is an option in the FreeBSD case. > Yeah, I know that certain features make it easier to implement a > UNIX-like VM system, but if you can run across all of the hardware, > that's maybe more important. As I said, this is not just VM system. This is also your process structure, which affects things like what you can and can't do in a context switch, and interrupt structure, affecting what you may do in your device drivers and how you do locking of data structures in the kernel. It appears to me that you've not read the Alpha Architecture Manual, since this has nothing to do with writable control stores, and you don't seem to realise just what sort of conditions the VMS or ARC PALcode put on your kernel. cjs -- Curt Sampson <cjs@portal.ca> 604-257-9400 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil. Any opinions expressed are mine and mine alone. The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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