On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Jonathan Stone wrote:

> The `esp' name is a Sparc-ism that's
> painful and counter-intuitive for machines with PROMs and/or vendor OS
> code cthat refer to an "asc" -- no less so than "asc" would be on
> Sparcs, for the same reasons.  Perhaps the right fix is allowing an
> attachment-specific override of the driver name visible to users?

I would far rather just pick a name and use it across as many
platforms as possible. Overriding the name makes debugging and
kernel configuration more confusing; I really don't care to be
hunting for a non-existent esp.c when I'm trying to figure out what
a particular error message means. Also, some of us came to Suns,
Alphas and whatnot from NetBSD/i386, and have never used the vendor
operating system on these systems, so again doing things differently
from port to port is more confusing, not less. (I ran into this
with the -a option when booting a kernel, which is `ask' under the
i386, but means `boot into multiuser mode' on the Alpha.)

It shouldn't be a problem to put a `device conversion table' into
the INSTALL document to make sure that people moving over from the
vendor OS on a particular piece of hardware know what the NetBSD
device names are.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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