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Date:      Wed, 14 Mar 2001 09:09:51 -0600 (CST)
From:      Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us>
To:        Chris Sears <cbsears@ix.netcom.com>
Cc:        <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: ecc kld for FreeBSD 4.2
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.32.0103140843280.67772-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us>
In-Reply-To: <3AAF10B9.43280512@ix.netcom.com>

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On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Chris Sears wrote:

> THANKS! and compliments on your name.  It was a quick and simple
> port to see if people were interested. I've sent it to the
> author/maintainer Dan Hollis but I haven't gotten a response yet.
> He has an email list on Yahoo/Groups and there is occasional
> traffic so it isn't dead code.

I'm sure there would be much interest, especially since FreeBSD is run
on many systems with ECC memory subsystems.  I, for one, don't build a
server without ECC memory and a chipset that does
auto-correction/scrubbing.  It would be taboo.  Even my workstations
have it.  :-)

> Yes, I did notice that there was no licensing.  I will broach that
> with him. I can live with GPL since I see this as being a KLD
> which can be installed from source.  But I prefer BSD.

Since not everybody would want to use a module, or even could use a
module, a BSD license would be ideal so that it could be compiled
directly into the kernel.  It is entirely up to the author what he
wants to use, of course.

> DEV_MODULE vs DRIVER_MODULE.  It is true that DEV_MODULE is much
> less common but it is minimally sufficient.  If it were a
> DRIVER_MODULE, then it would just be allocating a bunch of
> structures and entry points and noop'ing them out.  But perhaps
> someone else could lend an opinion.

Looking at the differences, DEV_MODULE did look quite a bit easier to
use.  :-)

> Thanks for the 440BX patch, I'll add it.  As far as the
> ServerWorks III chipset, the necessary documentation has *not*
> been available.  I think they are a small company and a little
> paranoid WRT intellectual property. If you have it, or if you can
> get it, this would be great.

It wasn't really a 440BX-related patch, just some pretty-print
information when the module was loaded, some of which is probably
irrelevant and could be removed (such as the SBE/MBE stuff).  Just
saying that the ECC module was loaded was a little bit too light on
the information side.  :-)  On a similar note, how can we go about
getting similar run-time information out of this, such as the current
count of SBEs and MBEs?  Some sysctls perhaps?  The current code uses
procfs under Linux, but that seems ugly to me.

> Basically, I would like to break the file into Linux, BSD and ecc
> sections. This would simplify things for the author who has
> expressed interest in a kernel patch as well as a module.  The
> reason for kernel was that module support can be config'd out on
> Linux.

I talked to Daniel O'Connor on IRC, and he mentioned he would like to
clean it up a bit.  Splitting it into OS-specific and OS-independant
parts would be a good idea, I think.

> I'm not sure how kld's are distributed as there don't seem to be
> any in the ports collection.  And I wouldn't mind cleaning it up a
> bit.

Actually, I can think of at least two -- ports/emulators/rtc, depended
on by the ports/emulators/vmware2 port, which has yet another kernel
module in it.


-- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net
   FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet.
   For IA32 and Alpha architectures. IA64, PPC, and ARM under development.
   http://www.freebsd.org



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