Re: A mobile user's wishlist

["Dmitri Nikulin" <dnikulin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/16/06, joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 06:53:07PM +0900, YONETANI Tomokazu wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 11:10:59AM +0900, YONETANI Tomokazu wrote:
> > > > FreeBSD has tools for that: sysutils/est and sysutils/estrcl
> > >
> > > FreeBSD has a daemon named powerd and it's based on estctrl.
> > > I'll try porting it to DragonFly.
> >
> > Obviously I spoke too soon for this part; powerd is too hard to port
> > without cpufreq framework.  I'm going to commit est driver alone for now
> > and work on a DragonFly patch for estd(if Johannes Hofmann hasn't started
> > it yet).
>
> That's why I suggested that it might be easier to use the code from
> NetBSD. The infrastructure daemons like estd are in pkgsrc after all.
>
> Joerg

What's the value of just scrapping a lot of what DragonFly has and
then importing pretty much *all* hardware support from NetBSD? The
device framework and driver set are portable, stable and with a
significant user base, without the locking monstrosity of FreeBSD. You
could end up having the device polling framework of DragonFly with the
abstracted checksumming and other offloading provided in NetBSD with
ifconfig options, for example, giving great power to network devices
which support both (e.g. em and fxp).

At least the way it is now, the number of machines on which DragonFly
will run properly is extremely small compared to NetBSD-current, often
just because of quirks in (typically nForce 3&4) motherboard chipsets.
If it is at all possible and practical to take what NetBSD already
has, it'd be a great boost, and be easier to merge in differences
later. Of course then it would all diverge again once the MP lock is
removed...

</dreaming>

 -- Dmitri Nikulin