Re: may b a minor error
Re: may b a minor error
- Subject: Re: may b a minor error
- From: Michael Smith <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 11:17:25 -0700
On Jun 16, 2006, at 8:00 AM, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
Michael Smith writes:
Of course, if there was a 64-bit kernel, it wouldn't run on 32-bit
hardware, and it would require a complete re-write of every
device driver in existence.
The speedbump of Tiger required so many recompiles anyway that you
probably could have gotten most drivers for free just by having the
latest version of Xcode build drivers by default as fat 32/64 bit
binaries.
What was that about "baiting"? You know as well as I do that you
can't just "recompile" your average driver to get a 64-bit version,
and you certainly can't sell it for money without testing it.
Contrary to what passes for popular opinion here, that isn't the
sort of change that Apple would typically foist on developers without
plenty of notice.
Above Terry mentioned changes to the size and/or layout of a struct
uio. What do you do about old (10.2 era) drivers compiled when the
uio accessors did not exist? Do they just fail to load after Terry's
change? Or do they corrupt kernel memory?
All of this stuff is versioned. If it's possible and necessary to
export
different versions of the interfaces, then those can be implemented
as shims and old drivers that require them will match and be
taken care of.
It seems to me that
you're going to have to have a flag-day of 10.4 anyway, and that
10.x ( x <=3) drivers are going to stop working because of your
kernel changes.
Absolutely. The question is simply whether it happens once, or
for every major release.
Solaris has a much, much more stable driver ABI than you
guys do (drivers compiled before MacOSX even existed still
work) and it allows direct access to structures (like uio).
Sure, and if you want to assume that changes in hardware architecture
and the way software uses that hardware stopped fifteen years ago
then that model works fine.
What, like NextStep's IOKit that MacOSX uses? :)
More bait? I believe in your last breath you were complaining that
I/O Kit changes too fast...
= Mike
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