On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 01:13:55PM -0500, Brian S. Julin wrote: > > > I'll take a shot at qualifying what is is that KGI wants: > > Yes, we definitely want page-fault handlers if we can possibly > get them: > > 1) For fossil cards where the aperture is smaller than the VRAM, > with impossible-or-dangerous-to-expose-to-userpace aperture > control. Also this provides naive applications with often desired > contiguous direct buffer access. > 2) For fossil planar mode cards with dangerous-to-expose-to-userspace > plane-mask controls, to allow for direct access to different > planes/plane-masks such that naive applications need not > explicitly use an IOCTL to set the plane masks. *
> * Why support such cretinous hardware? Laptops. Especially of the > non-x86 variety. I'm curious how likely either of these are to come up on platforms FreeBSD is likely to support. I'm sure Linux and NetBSD will find them, but FreeBSD's focus is on "modern", "popular" architectures. The architectures with active ports either working or being developed are i386, ia64, x86-64, sparc64 (pci only for now), PowerPC, and alpha. There's also a rather inactive arm port (the list hasn't even been spammed since August) and a proposed MIPS port with no one working on it. Add the fact that actual 386 and 486sx parts are not supported by the GENERIC kernel in 5.0-current and I'm wondering if either of these weird types of hardware are going to appear anytime soon outside of some really strange situations. If it got us a port sooner with fewer bugs, I'd certaintly be happy to see the FreeBSD port not support ancient hardware. Linux and NetBSD are both doing an excelent job in that space. -- Brooks -- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE. PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529 9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
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