Major changes to the generic device framework for FreeBSD/alpha:
* Eliminate bus_t and make it possible for all devices to have
attached children.
* Support dynamically extendable interfaces for drivers to replace
both the function pointers in driver_t and bus_ops_t (which has been
removed entirely. Two system defined interfaces have been defined,
'device' which is mandatory for all devices and 'bus' which is
recommended for all devices which support attached children.
* In addition, the alpha port defines two simple interfaces 'clock'
for attaching various real time clocks to the system and 'mcclock'
for the many different variations of mc146818 clocks which can be
attached to different alpha platforms. This eliminates two more
function pointer tables in favour of the generic method dispatch
system provided by the device framework.
Future device interfaces may include:
* cdev and bdev interfaces for devfs to use in replacement for specfs
and the fixed interfaces bdevsw and cdevsw.
* scsi interface to replace struct scsi_adapter (not sure how this
works in CAM but I imagine there is something similar there).
* various tailored interfaces for different bus types such as pci,
isa, pccard etc.
* Eliminate bus_t and make it possible for all devices to have
attached children.
* Support dynamically extendable interfaces for drivers to replace
both the function pointers in driver_t and bus_ops_t (which has been
removed entirely. Two system defined interfaces have been defined,
'device' which is mandatory for all devices and 'bus' which is
recommended for all devices which support attached children.
* In addition, the alpha port defines two simple interfaces 'clock'
for attaching various real time clocks to the system and 'mcclock'
for the many different variations of mc146818 clocks which can be
attached to different alpha platforms. This eliminates two more
function pointer tables in favour of the generic method dispatch
system provided by the device framework.
Future device interfaces may include:
* cdev and bdev interfaces for devfs to use in replacement for specfs
and the fixed interfaces bdevsw and cdevsw.
* scsi interface to replace struct scsi_adapter (not sure how this
works in CAM but I imagine there is something similar there).
* various tailored interfaces for different bus types such as pci,
isa, pccard etc.
work in progress and has never booted a real machine. Initial
development and testing was done using SimOS (see
http://simos.stanford.edu for details). On the SimOS simulator, this
port successfully reaches single-user mode and has been tested with
loads as high as one copy of /bin/ls :-).
Obtained from: partly from NetBSD/alpha
