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Date:      Sat, 30 Nov 2002 22:27:27 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
Cc:        Yury Tarasievich <grog@grsu.by>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: documentation on kernel locks, mutexes?
Message-ID:  <3DE9ABCF.80AAAC2F@mindspring.com>
References:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1021130184341.29371C-100000@fledge.watson.org>

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Robert Watson wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Terry Lambert wrote:
> > Yury Tarasievich wrote:
> > > I need to port some driver from linux to freebsd and, somehow,
> > > I can't find documentation on kernel locks and mutexes.
> > > There are no man pages, links from handbook are broken, and search on
> > > freebsd site gives nothing (besides the handbook itself).
> > >
> > > Where can I find some docs?
> >
> > Kernel documentation is poor, because interfaces are not as fixed in
> > stone as you might expect them to be to encourage third party
> > developement and porting efforts like yours.
> 
> Funny, the SMPng primitives seem in general to be fairly well documented.
> See my previous e-mail to Yury with a list of man page references.  It's
> certainly true that the source is a good reference to look at existing
> locking strategies, but there certainly do appear to be man pages for the
> locking primitives.

I was thinking more in terms of device driver information.  All
of the "how to write a driver for newbus", "how to write a CAM
driver", "how to use devfs from the kernel", "what XXX to do in
FreeBSD, given YYY in Linux", "how to port a driver from Linux
to FreeBSD", etc., are missing.

While it's true that kernel locks and mutexes are documented for
SMPng, he posted to -hackers, not -current, and so he's probably
not interested in -current primitives that aren't available in
the 4.x -RELEASE and -STABLE branches.

His points about the handbook are salient, too.


-- Terry

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