Subject: Re: Relevance of ARM merge (was: Re: port-arm26 and port-arm32 into
To: Ken Seefried <ken@seefried.com>
From: Ben Harris <bjh21@netbsd.org>
List: port-arm32
Date: 02/14/2001 12:20:25
On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Ken Seefried wrote:
> Personally, I find the current fad to divert effort to merge support for
> arm26 interesting & quaint, but ultimately (for me) irrelevant. Before one
> reads too much into that, I *strongly* encourage continued support for the
> old platforms. I've got NetBSD/VAX on a VS3100m40, after all.
So far, I haven't noticed any code committed in the direction of
arm26/arm32 code sharing that wasn't my work, so most of the diversion of
effort is from native arm26 work, rather than from anything that would
help NetBSD/arm32. I am, admittedly, using some of Chris Gilbert's time
for testing ELF support on arm32, but arm32 needs ELF support anyway. I
hope (and believe) that the gains to arm32 from my working on improving
the shared code will outweigh the costs.
> Just a thought, but perhaps there needs to be an arm/riscos (or some such)
> branch for older platforms (are there any non-Acorn arm26 platforms other
> than the oddball arm26 eval board that I saw on eBay a few months back?),
> and an arm32 branch for the more modern stuff (say, non-RISC-OS ARM6 and
> above).
I don't think that trying to shoehorn the Risc PC and Archimedes into a
single MACHINE is a good idea. While they share some peripherals, the
core hardware is fundamentally different. I can't really comment on the
idea of splitting arm32 in two, though I'd suspect that the differences
between the various non-Risc-PC arm32 platforms are at least as great as
those between them and the Risc PC.
--
Ben Harris <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/arm26 <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/arm26/>