[openbeos] Re: Pentium 4, newer AMD support
- From: "Michael Phipps" <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 21:19:00 -0500
>
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that *drivers* could easily turn
>out to be the big issue in porting to other platforms, yes? Sure,
>porting the kernal is quite a bit of work, but once that's done you've
>got to have display drivers, network drivers, SCSI drivers, sound card
>drivers, etc., etc.
>
>None of which is to say that we shouldn't (eventually) port to
>everything we can get our hands on. ;)
Actually, Travis (heaping on massive loads of praise) designed NewOS
to be very portable. He has cleanly divided the code between architecture
specific and generic. I suspect that the porting of the OS should be fairly
simple, once you understand the platform. That is, though, 90% of the work.
Reference, in Be's newsletters, Leo Schwab's hillarious text adventure type
story about building video drivers.
In any case, I agree with Eric here. Getting the kernel to work on, say, PPC
is one piece of work. Getting sufficient drivers for a workable system is
another, larger piece of work.
The kernel group will certainly keep Travis' design, as far as seperating out
architectural differences. But I certainly don't want to promise a ton of
platforms
and support for every machine under the sun. Not only can I not afford all of
those platforms, but most of the time, the internals are not publically
documented.
Nvidia is a prime example of this.
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