From 67eb1b335c5412b20b724867f971298d55fca05d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Marcel Moolenaar
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2003 03:31:10 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] Significant update (for whatever it means): o make it clear
that we want to work towards becoming a tier 1 by giving the subject a
subsection of its own. List what it involves. o Add a "sharpening the saw"
section for the many things that have been kludged or hacked and that need
a revisit and possibly a rewrite. o Flesh out the "ports and packages"
section. This is growing in importance.
---
en/platforms/ia64/todo.sgml | 81 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
1 file changed, 63 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)
diff --git a/en/platforms/ia64/todo.sgml b/en/platforms/ia64/todo.sgml
index 0af0ee2dcb..2a873fb3bb 100644
--- a/en/platforms/ia64/todo.sgml
+++ b/en/platforms/ia64/todo.sgml
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-
+
%includes;
@@ -22,30 +22,75 @@
- What needs to be done
+ What needs to be done.
This page tries to be the starting point for people trying to find
- anything that can be done.
+ anything that can be done. The order of the items on this page are
+ not strictly an indication of priority, but it is a good indication.
+ There are in all likelyhood tasks that are not mentioned here, but
+ that should be done nonetheless. A typical example is the maintenance
+ of the ia64 web pages... unfortunately.
- Package building errors
+ Becoming a tier 1 platform.
- Look here
- for the most up-to-date list of ports that fail to build for some reason
- or another.
+ With two releases as a tier 2 platform, it is time to work towards
+ becoming a tier 1 platform. This involves tasks as varied as:
+
+ - Improve the installation process to take into account that
+ there is already a GPT with an EFI partition, including other
+ operating systems. The ability to add a FreeBSD entry to the
+ EFI boot menu is also a nice thing.
+ - Port the GNU debugger. It is sorely missed on a development
+ machine and required on tier 1 platforms.
+ - Port the X server (ports/x11/XFree86-4-Server). Not really
+ required for tier 1 status, but one cannot truely do without
+ if one wants to use ia64 as a desktop machine.
+
- To do list
+ Ports and packages,
- A complete list of things that need to be done is very likely not
- going to happen. There's just too much. Below a list of the larger
- or more important items.
+ A very important task for the success of FreeBSD on ia64 is making
+ sure that users have something to run besides ls(1). Our huge ports
+ collection has been targeting ia32 for the most part, so it is not
+ surprising that there are a lot of ports that do not build or do not
+ work on ia64. Look
+ here
+ for the most up-to-date list of ports that fail to build for some
+ reason or another. Note that if there are ports depending on one or
+ more ports that fail, those are not built and are not counted. A good
+ way to help out here is to work on those ports that have a lot of
+ ports depending on it (see the "Aff." column in the table).
-
- - Improve UP and especially SMP stability
- - gdb(1) support and port
- - Continue work on MCA
- - Revisit kernel loading
- - Revisit TR assignment
-
+ Sharpening the saw.
+
+ There are plenty functions (especially assembly routines) that
+ have been written to provide the missing functionality without any
+ consideration for speed and/or robustness. Reviewing those functions
+ and replacing them if necessary is a good task that can be done
+ concurrently and independently from other activity and does not
+ necessarily require huge amounts of knowledge and/or experience.
+
+ Core development.
+
+ On top of the high-level things that do not work or do not exist,
+ there is also some rather involved rewriting to be done at the
+ foundation and can potentionally affect all other platforms as well.
+ This includes:
+
+ - Improve UP and SMP stability by revamping the PMAP module.
+ The low-level handling of VM translations needs to be improved.
+ This involves both correctness as well as performance.
+ - Basic device drivers such as sio(4) and syscons(4) do not
+ work on ia64 machines that do not have support for legacy
+ devices. This is a rather big issue, because it affects all
+ platforms and may involve rewriting (big) parts of certain
+ subsystems. Clearly a task that needs wholesale support and
+ coordination.
+ - Better handling of sparse (physical) memory configurations
+ by not creating VM tables that span the whole address space,
+ but rather cover the memory "chunks" that are present. We are
+ currently forced to ignore memory because of this.
+
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