> since the hard part is writing drivers, just do a normal port using v[acl]. > not fussing about with all the other things that will otherwise go wrong > will allow you more time to write those drivers.
My take is perhaps flawed, but the way I see it, the BIOS, bootstrap loader and debugger (all rolled into PMON, supplied with source and ready for cross compilation on a Linux/386 platform) insists on ELF, optionally S-record format executables. It seems easier and more beneficial to shoehorn the Plan 9 kernel sources into GCC (Russ has already done a lot of the ground work for that) than to convert the Plan 9 kernel binaries into ELF. I'm not sure about S-record, I have a feeling a lot will be lost in the translation. Now, I really don't mind hearing of different approaches, often these have turned out to be better than the dead end I had picked, so I'll keep that firmly in mind. In this case there is a small additional advantage to go the ELF/GCC route, namely that I will be using a 64-bit compiler for the kernel itself. That said, I'm still fighting with the thread context switch stuff: there was some exciting stuff Lucho directed me to, but so far I seem to be held back by the fact that what I found applies to Gentoo rather than Debian. I need to dig a little deeper. Also, the 32-bit/64-bit question comes up again. I don't know enough about MIPS to do more than ponder over the likelihood of getting a 64-bit compiler running by the time I have the kernel ported. I'm putting that on the backburner. As for drivers, I'm hoping that most of the drivers will be compatible with their 386 versions. There is source for Linux and there is documentation (I have only found it in Chinese, but that's still better than nothing and I have not looked very far). I'm too far from that bridge to focus on it at this point, I can only wish that I will get to it any time soon. But again, I'm willing to listen. ++L
