Ross Harvey wrote:

> Yes, to run XFree86 you choose one of:
> 
> [[ ... deleted ... ]]
> 
> 	(2) Do a horrible, disgusting kludge to fake up inb(), outb(),
> 	    (gee, what do they mean when you have more than one bus?)
> 	    and device mapping in order to generally rape our otherwise
> 	    nice device abstractions and flatten them out.
> 
> [[ ... deleted ... ]]
> 
> Option (2) was avoided previously because of purism (at least in part, I
> think) but for the record: I've made the decision that it is now OK for
> NetBSD/alpha to go this way. (Hehe.)

The portmeister speaks :-)

> FreeBSD chose (2), which doesn't even look very hard given the rather small
> size of their diff. It's certainly even easier to do again, given that the
> diff is public. I'm thinking that we could have a separate configuration
> program (maybe options to wsconsctl(8)) that would identify which bus and
> which device would be the target of the inb/outb/devmap compatibility
> interface.

Do you have a handy pointer to the FreeBSD diffs?

> At this point, I think we really must go with (2). (BTW, note that a
> partial-(2) has become easier recently, as BWX-capable alphas are a larger
> fraction of our user base these days.)

This is 21164 and up, right?

> Hope this helps. I'll volunteer to help with the kernel work and with any
> needed alpha assembly or xf86-assembly-conversion.

I've not looked at alpha much, but if anything I'm more of a MIPS person
so I'll probably find alpha easier to understand that x86 :-)

Simon.