[ros-kernel] Different Hardware Architectures

[Stephen Hodges]

There isn't even USB support for i386 yet. That means there are some people who can't use keyboards and mice, without an emulator. There appears to only be one NIC driver, so that means not even the i386 people are always lucky enough to get networking functionality.

As for others, in no particular order

* Watchdog support
* IrDA
* Bluetooth
* PCMCIA
* AGP
* APM

Aside from other drivers not currently working, such as the sound.

I'm not against porting. There is just too much that needs to be done in general before you go and subvert the process in it's infancy. Clearly there is more that needs to be done to meet the needs of majority of the world. PPC, Alpha and others are the minority and probably would not even be used by many even if the support was there, at least not while there is barely any attention coming from the x86 crowd on the project. 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Robert Köpferl<mailto:rob at koepferl.de> 
  To: ReactOS Kernel List<mailto:ros-kernel at reactos.com> 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 9:33 PM
  Subject: Re: [ros-kernel] Different Hardware Architectures


  Yea, actually there's one realistic person here.
  Not against a port, but there's still more importand. And Waldo, you forgot to 
  enum the missing Compiler which spits out PE-exes

  Waldo Alvarez Cañizares schrieb:

  > <snip>
  > 
  > Another reason why it could be useful to port ReactOS would be that
  > porting a program is a reasonably effective way of debugging certain
  > aspects of the program, as some careful thought will have to put into
  > things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
  > 
  > Hi Jasper:
  >  
  > I think that more productive would be to finish or to keep at a reasonable point the regression tests because a port will fix things once but the regressions tests will last forever. Notice that we are talking here to port a system that in my opinion should not be called as such, we have more than 100 bugs laughing at us, we have things implemented in a wrong way mainly because of the lack of information, we have tons of unfinished things (some in 0%) and guys you talk about a port that will not give any reasonable benefit. 
  >  
  > On the other side I think you are all underestimating the task. There are tons arch dependant code just there in the runtime library specially math functions are all written in assembler (do not forget that the code is duplicated somewhere else) on the other side you have lots of dependent code there in the kernel for task switching, stack switching , code only in assembler in ntdll to interface with the executive, some of memory management are simply in assembler. On the other side I think that the endianness issues are not something to say "just some endianness issues somewhere" come on we still have huge amounts of bugs right there and you say just a couple of endianness issues, believe me you wont be fixing that so easily. Do not forget the hal, cause you need a new hal never done before, the interrupt dispatcher is in assembler too. By what I know of PPC it uses PCI but some macs use NUBUS, come on we do not have ISA, MCI support and you still want to put a new bus. R
  eactOS does not even runs on a i386 and you still want another CPU.
  >  
  > Fine , if that's not enough, lets suppose you get a system working in PPC, lets suppose you are a complete genius/working beast and get those x86 programs running ont top of ROS flawlessly at a reasonable good speed, fine which drivers are you going to attach to it. Are you going to implement those too or translate them? Are you sure all are going to work? Come I'm sure that some drivers will never run on top of the ROS-x86. I'm sure there are lots of hardware never implemented in the PC also.
  >  
  > Mark this words is a complete waste of time and you won't finish it in a short time. I think a port now will only delay the project, is simply out of time. And even more if I where to do a port I would do it for Alpha or MIPS where NT 4.0 already runs, not to PPC. Or what about Itanium, seems that Itanium is going to be supported by MS for a while since WinXP runs there.
  >  
  > Best Regards
  > Waldo Alvarez
  > 
  > 
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