Re: POWER64 architecture support

Hello Jan,

> - License; we won't be able to accept any other license than the current
> BSD-style license

That's fine.

> Thus if you'd like to contribute a platform-port, we'd also ask you to
> feel responsible for its platform-specific parts for some while.

My first concern is to bring those parts of the (32 bit) PPC port whose
correctness I am materially able to verify to a working state in order
to be able to experiment safely in userland.  From what I have seen so
far, that may be possible with some hacking & tweaking here and there
but would ultimately only increase the enthropy in the code ;)  The
clean (but more painful) way involves figuring out what those parts
of the architecture specific code try to accomplish that I am not
concerned with (just yet) to see which sections of code can be de-
interleaved or need/suggest/allow reorganisation.  That takes a little
more time, of course, but is something I prefer since it will generally
increase maintainability of code and flatten the learning curve for
beginners.

One example in this respect is increasing the distinction between
code used for the embedded and general purpose/HPC PPC worlds since
they seem to diverge noticeably in the kernel/supervisor mode.  My
personal interest generally lies in the latter of the two worlds
since that is the kind of hardware available to me right now.  I'd
very much like to see a stable SMP kernel for the 970MP ;)  Another
topic is interrupt control which seems to be handled differently on
the various platforms.  This is also the area which I am lacking
proper documentation for at the moment.

> whether you'd be willing to get at least all pre-packaged user-level
> programs running, all kernel syscalls tested (e.g. l4test), and then
> put up a how-to page, answer port-specific mailing list questions, and
> the like. We'd prefer the latter.

If the PowerPC port needs a new maintainer I shall be happy to step in
after I have familiarised myself with the rest of the code (my previous L4 experience is limited to Fiasco/the old L4 API and L4env) and figured
out how GCC's PowerPC code generator backend works.  Speaking of which:
I read at http://l4ka.org/100.php that there is a patch for GCC that has
it generate EABI-compliant code.  Can you make that available somewhere
for inspection?


Cheers,
Christian

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