site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On Jun 16, 2006, at 8:00 AM, Andrew Gallatin wrote: 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? 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. More bait? I believe in your last breath you were complaining that I/O Kit changes too fast... = Mike _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... Michael Smith writes: 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. What, like NextStep's IOKit that MacOSX uses? :) This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com