ports revision 1.2
1$NetBSD: ports,v 1.2 2017/01/13 13:40:44 reinoud Exp $ 2 3NetBSD Ports Roadmap 4==================== 5 6This roadmap covers ports and port-specific issues, and also bus-level 7material even if it's not strictly port-specific. 8 9The following elements, projects, and goals are considered strategic 10priorities for the project: 11 12 1. EFI boot for x86 13 2. xhci support 14 3. Get arm64/aarch64 working 15 16The following elements, projects, and goals are not strategic 17priorities but are still important undertakings worth doing: 18 19 4. USER_LDT for amd64 20 5. riscv and/or or1k ports 21 6. cheri port 22 23The following elements, projects, and goals are perhaps less pressing; 24this doesn't mean one shouldn't work on them but the expected payoff 25is perhaps less than for other things: 26 27 7. pdp10/risc36/odd-bitsize ports 28 29 30Explanations 31============ 32 33 34 1. EFI boot for x86 35 36EFI boot is now often required for new x86 hardware. This is 37effectively a mandatory item for -8. Fortunately, nonaka has most of 38it done, though it's not yet committed. 39 40 - As of January 2017 nobody is known to be working on this. 41 - There is currently no clear timeframe or release target. 42 - Contact agc for further information. 43 44 45 2. xhci support 46 47xhci is also critical for new x86 hardware. Enough has been committed 48to be able to use USB on xhci machines; but (AIUI) the USB 3.0 49specific features mostly aren't implemented yet. We would like to get 50this pulled into -7 51 52 - As of January 2017 ... who is working on this? XXX 53 - Contact jakllsch (?) for further information. 54 55 56 3. Get arm64/aarch64 working 57 58We have some arm64 code but apparently it doesn't really work yet. 59 60 - As of January 2017 nobody is known to be actively working on this. 61 - There is currently no clear timeframe or release target. 62 - Contact: ? (XXX) 63 64 65 4. USER_LDT for amd64 66 67The amd64 port is lacking the USER_LDT bits needed to be able to run 68Wine. Adding these bits does not seem to be a particularly large job 69(and some of the bits are in place already) but it persistently 70doesn't get done. Money's been offered in the past, without result. 71 72 - As of January 2017 nobody is known to be working on this. 73 - There is currently no clear timeframe or release target. 74 - Contact ? (XXX) for further information. 75 76 77 5. riscv and/or or1k ports 78 79We have some riscv code and a bit of or1k code, but neither is done. 80 81 - As of January 2017 nobody is known to be working on this. 82 - There is currently no clear timeframe or release target. 83 - Contact matt@ for further information. 84 85 86 6. cheri port 87 88http://cheri-cpu.org 89There are a number of reasons to tackle this; it will serve as a code 90quality lever. Also there's already a FreeBSD port to steal from. 91 92 93 7. pdp10/risc36/odd-bitsize ports 94 95There's been a fair amount of loose talk over the years about doing a 96port to a machine that's got 9-bit bytes, or is word-addressed, or 97both. The PDP-10 is one such target; it's also been observed that a 98more modern architecture would probably be more likely to allow a 99vaguely performant FPGA implementation, and something tentatively 100called "risc36" was conceived. 101 102This is both a quixotic retrocomputing project and also a quixotic 103code quality project: making the NetBSD code base work on either 104word-addressed machines or 9-bit/36-bit machines or both would be good 105for it. However, it's also a rather large undertaking. 106 107