Bryce Denney wrote:
>
> Since plex86 and bochs share significant chunks of code, how can we best
> benefit from each others' efforts? Should someone from each project just
> keep an eye on the other's CVS tree and watch for changes of interest?
> Do you want to sync up only when there's a release, or should we tell each
> other whenever a major improvement or feature is added?
>
> >From a quick look through the source, I see the following parts in common:
> rombios, gui, iodev, and pc_system.
>
> One motivation for asking this now is that we're working on cleaning up
> the output of the printfs and panics, which will introduce tons of minor
> changes in formatting of output messages, etc. I want to understand
> plex86's needs WRT the shared code, before the sources diverge too far.
> For example, are the Bochs I/O models always going to be needed, or are
> they only used for now until the Real Thing is developed in its place?
In a matter of months, I'd say, we should talk more about this.
Ultimately and ideally, we would both use a plug-in architecture
with the same specs. That way we could easily share devices, even
at the binary level. We're going to need to move to PCI, make
some changes and think this one out well. There's the threading
issues as well.
We could potentially also share guest-OS specific drivers, if
we can also write a common interface for that.
The question is timing. For now, there are more pressing issues.
In general, my Open Source design philosophy is to make sure
that we have periods of time when we work on usability, avoiding
the situation where people never have a release that is usable.
I want to focus on that sometime soon after hammering this
new DT engine into plex86. Nothing major, just get what we have
working/documented and running a small set of OSes.
Then I'll be more interested in a common development plan.
-Kevin
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Kevin Lawton [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MandrakeSoft, Inc. Plex86 developer
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/ http://www.plex86.org/
