MPSAFE TTY schedule - update

Hello everyone,

First of all, I am really impressed by the amount of people that have
shown interest in helping me drive this project forward:

- kris_at_ and some other people has been testing the patches. So far they
  found some small bugs, which should all be fixed now. Thanks!

- marcel_at_ and nyan_at_ have already been working on uart(4). Last time I
  heard, they may have already gotten it working on certain pieces of
  PC98 hardware.

- kan_at_ has committed a patch in the mpsafetty P4 branch to make dcons(4)
  working again.

Thank you!

I think I'll continue using this schedule, with some very small changes,
based on previous discussions:

* Ed Schouten <ed_at_80386.nl> wrote:
> - Not all drivers have been ported to the new TTY layer yet. These
>   drivers still need to be ported: sio(4), cy(4), digi(4), ubser(4),
>   uftdi(4), nmdm(4), ng_h4(4), ng_tty(4), snp(4), rp(4), rc(4), si(4),
>   umodem(4), dcons(4).

This should now read:

- Not all drivers have been ported to the new TTY layer yet. These
  drivers still need to be ported: sio(4), cy(4), digi(4), ubser(4),
  nmdm(4), ng_h4(4), ng_tty(4), snp(4), rp(4), rc(4), si(4).

If time permits, I'll fix nmdm(4). I've also received some messages
about si(4) and digi(4), so I'll contact those people to see what we can
do here.

Someone emailed me about ng_h4(4), ng_tty(4) and snp(4). There are no
short term plans to make these drivers work. I am going to implement a
new hooks interface into the TTY layer after we've integrated this
patchset. I don't want to bring in too much code in a single run.

> July 13 2008:
> 	Make uart(4) the default serial port driver, instead of sio(4).
> 	sio(4) has not been ported to the new TTY layer and is very hard
> 	to do so. uart(4) has been proven to be more portable than
> 	sio(4) and already supports the hardware we need.

It looks like we can do this on i386 and amd64. pc98 still needs some
polishing, but I've got full confidence this will be sorted out in time.
I'll closely track marcel_at_'s work the next couple of days to make sure
we can do this without breaking too much.

> August 3 2008:
> 	Disconnect drivers from the build that haven't been patched in
> 	the MPSAFE TTY branch.

I won't disconnect drivers here which are in the progress of being
ported. If foo_at_ sends me an email to say he's working on rc(4) for
example, I will leave that driver alone.

Again, I should bug people with:

> Please, make sure we can make this a smooth transition by
> testing/reviewing my code. I tend to generate diffs very often. They can
> be downloaded here:
> 
> 	http://www.il.fontys.nl/~ed/projects/mpsafetty/patches/

Thanks!

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed_at_80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/