Reminder: non-mpsafetty drivers to be *dis*connected on Sunday

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008, M. Warner Losh wrote:

> In message: <20080801134435.GQ99951 at hoeg.nl>
>            Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl> writes: : Maybe I'm replying to too 
> many messages at the same time, but as John : said, it's a lot easier making 
> the remaining drivers work after the code : has been integrated. It's not 
> like we're permanently carving things into : stone - we've almost got a full 
> year to get it all working again.
>
> We've heard this promise before.  It rarely has resulted in the promised 
> work.  I don't think this is the right way forward.

I have to admit that I was quite pleasantly surprised that so many network 
drivers became MPSAFE in the last couple of months, and USB will nicely round 
that out.  It may help if Ed could take whatever notes he sent Peter about sio 
and drop them on the Wiki as the beginning of a howto on adapting drivers to 
the new tty layer.  One thing I would really like to see is us taking this as 
an opportunity to get more people interested in maintaining the tty drivers we 
have -- now is a really good opportunity for people do adopt drivers and 
update them.

I fall down a bit more on the Warner side here also: I think posting the docs 
in advance of removing the drivers, and having a couple of weeks gap between 
those events, is a much more productive way to achieve the goal of updated 
drivers.  It also means that we don't have timeline gaps when serial drivers 
for devices are broken: when people are playing the binary search game to find 
some other problem, the last thing they want is to hit dates where their 
system consoles don't work.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge