Re: Project UDI?
Yes, I've looked at it. It's a very bad idea. I know some of the people involved, and I spent a substantial portion of the early 90's running aroudn doing the DDI at Sun with the notion it would bring a grand interface for all Unices etc... I've seen many, many, efforts in this area. I believe that this is just the wrong thing, now. As someone who develops drivers for multiple platforms I should be interested in this, but I'm not. It's solving yesterday's problems today at tomorrow's prices. The differences between *BSD, Solaris, Linux, AIX and NT for doing drivers is really not a substantial leaf node driver problem as most of these efforts try to address- all of these platforms offer more or less the same services to drivers (mapping registers, thread synchronization of varying kinds, memory allocation. Careful design and modern compilers have made code sharing between all of these platforms with macros && inlines both relatively straightforward and not that inefficient. The real issue then becomes both nexus driver issues and data structure and data movement issues- in this case, IIRC, UDI takes more the approach NT takes in that there are implicit marshalling/demarshalling domains between layers. When you have a huge single product line where you have multiple disjoint variant bus interconnect pieces that can plug together that require substantially different device methods, this approach is cool- this is why the DKI/DDI for sparc was such a great idea- you could have massive main and secondary I/O bus variation and both leaf and a large number of nexus drivers don't have to change- very cool for binary distributions. However, the world is a lot different now. There are a greatly reduced number of different types of hardware that have to programmed differently, and those that would otherwise need to tend to have this solved by h/w engineers who don't want to wait 2 years for the software to be written. The world is also moving to an open-source model so VARs needing binary plugin types of systems is somewhat less critical than it used to be (don't even *begin* to mention win32/NT being a binary plugin model as everyone and his mother has to have separate distributions for each Service Pack release). So the need for such complexity to solve hardware interconnect issues is a helluva lot less than it used to be. The other problem- data structuring- is not really a solvable problem. If your network stack and drivers works in units of mbufs, it's going to have to go through all sorts of contortions for the same driver to do streams as well. Note that both mbufs && streams stacks can exist in the same kernel, so maybe this isn't as good an example as it could be, but I think we'd all agree that the efforts of data structure/movement encapsulation for a single driver to cover multiple systems could be tough. There was a paper at the last Usenix about this (someone help me out here and dig out the reference)... That's my .02 cents. On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Peter da Silva wrote: > > Anyone had a look at this? > > http://www.project-udi.org/ > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
> Yes, I've looked at it. It's a very bad idea. I know some of the people > involved, and I spent a substantial portion of the early 90's running > aroudn doing the DDI at Sun with the notion it would bring a grand > interface for all Unices etc... I've seen many, many, efforts in this > area. Hmmm... I didn't see any mention of FreeBSD on the page, so I thought it'd be worthwhile raising a flag. It looked at first glance sort of like an upgraded version of Intel's RMX-86-based UDI stuff from the '80s. I don't recall that being really horrible, but I'll take your word for it. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Peter da Silva wrote: > > Yes, I've looked at it. It's a very bad idea. I know some of the people > > involved, and I spent a substantial portion of the early 90's running > > aroudn doing the DDI at Sun with the notion it would bring a grand > > interface for all Unices etc... I've seen many, many, efforts in this > > area. > > Hmmm... I didn't see any mention of FreeBSD on the page, so I thought it'd be > worthwhile raising a flag. It looked at first glance sort of like an upgraded > version of Intel's RMX-86-based UDI stuff from the '80s. I don't recall that > being really horrible, but I'll take your word for it. > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
Matthew Jacob wrote: > > Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My > attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying > things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") Uh, okay. Anything to help Mike out. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
> > Anyone had a look at this? > > http://www.project-udi.org/ Yes; I've been talking with various of the UDI folks off and on for several years now. It's an interesting project, and may offer us a canned solution for our next major driver architecture upheaval. At the moment, however, the big wait is for their planned open-source reference implementation, due out in the next few months. I think that everyone would agree that we want to see the architecture in action in a form that we can take apart and look carefully at before getting too carried away one way or the other. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
As I hope I conveyed in my initial reply to Peter; I think the UDI architecture is interesting, and may have something for us to learn from next time we feel the need to restructure our driver architecture. UDI's real strengths are likely to show up as we try to improve our multiprocessor performance if anywhere. On the other hand, Matt speaks from a lot of experience, and this is why I'm keen to see what UDI actually translates to in terms of code and performance. Until that time the issue is more or less deadlocked; the UDI folks know that we're cautiously interested, but as I told Mark Evanson late last year, we really need something more substantial to convince us that we should abandon our _very_ thin driver architecture for one that's at least an order of magnitude more complex. > Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My > attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying > things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") > > On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Peter da Silva wrote: > > > > Yes, I've looked at it. It's a very bad idea. I know some of the people > > > involved, and I spent a substantial portion of the early 90's running > > > aroudn doing the DDI at Sun with the notion it would bring a grand > > > interface for all Unices etc... I've seen many, many, efforts in this > > > area. > > > > Hmmm... I didn't see any mention of FreeBSD on the page, so I thought it'd be > > worthwhile raising a flag. It looked at first glance sort of like an upgraded > > version of Intel's RMX-86-based UDI stuff from the '80s. I don't recall that > > being really horrible, but I'll take your word for it. > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
Wes Peters wrote: > > Matthew Jacob wrote: > > > > Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My > > attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying > > things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") > > Uh, okay. Anything to help Mike out. ;^) "Dead body found in the park - detectives baffled" "FreeBSD joins UDI project" (DaemonNews headlines) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
> convince us that we should abandon our _very_ thin driver architecture > for one that's at least an order of magnitude more complex. Thin is not necessarily bad as it leaves a lot of room to maneuver. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Alex wrote: > Wes Peters wrote: > > > > Matthew Jacob wrote: > > > > > > Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My > > > attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying > > > things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") > > > > Uh, okay. Anything to help Mike out. ;^) > > > "Dead body found in the park - detectives baffled" > > "FreeBSD joins UDI project" Well, basically that'd be it. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Alex wrote: > Wes Peters wrote: > > > > Matthew Jacob wrote: > > > > > > Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My > > > attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying > > > things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") > > > > Uh, okay. Anything to help Mike out. ;^) > > > "Dead body found in the park - detectives baffled" > > "FreeBSD joins UDI project" > > (DaemonNews headlines) isn't this the reason for ESRs "Geeks With Guns" outings? -- jan +-// f. johan beisser //--+ email: jan[at]caustic.org web: http://www.caustic.org/~jan "knowledge is power. power corrupts. study hard, be evil." To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Project UDI?
"f.johan.beisser" wrote: > > On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Alex wrote: > > > Wes Peters wrote: > > > > > > Matthew Jacob wrote: > > > > > > > > Mike Smith has been interested in getting FreeBSD involved in this. My > > > > attitude has been "Over my dead body" (you have to watch out saying > > > > things like that- someone might respond with, "Uh, okay") > > > > > > Uh, okay. Anything to help Mike out. ;^) > > > > > > "Dead body found in the park - detectives baffled" > > > > "FreeBSD joins UDI project" > > > > (DaemonNews headlines) > > isn't this the reason for ESRs "Geeks With Guns" outings? No, those exist solely to shoot up old MSDN CD-ROMs. I'll try to scan a few of mine tonight. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
