As you might have seen if you read source-changes or tech-kern,
I've been working on a CVS branch, originally started by
Jason Thorpe, on which the device driver interface has been
changed to facilitate things like device cloning.

I would like to mainline this soon. I have tested it on
a few platforms, and I am not seeing any problems anymore
on them.

The changes aren't visible to userland, nor will their
be an immediate change in performance, but if people could
run testkernels to test stability, I'd be grateful.

There are testkernels (GENERIC) for i386, sparc and sparc64
in pub/NetBSD/misc/fvdl/devvp, on ftp.netbsd.org (and, by now,
on its mirrors). You can check out the kernel sources
from anoncvs by using the "-r thorpej-devvp" (without the
quotes) to the checkout command, for syssrc.

I'm especially interested in things that do unusual things
with character devices, for example ppp (which uses a different
line discipline on a tty). Or if you're using a raster
console with X on sparc (I've only tested sparc with a
serial console). Or block device usage such as ccd and
raidframe. I have tested a simple raid1, without problems.

The devvp sources are currently a few days behind -current.

Thanks,

- Frank

-- 
Frank van der Linden                           fvdl@wasabisystems.com
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