[Forum] Try only to realise the truth | ANN.lu |
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Try only to realise the truth : Comment 303 of 335 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Bernie Meyer on 07-Jul-2004 10:55 GMT | In reply to Comment 286 (Amon_Re): The line between what is considered "odd, but functional" and what is considered "broken" is probably quite difference in the embedded world.In the embedded world, you write your programs especially for the hardware in question; when you write your program, you *know* what hardware it is going to run on, and you can (and will :) take its peculiarities into account. So in the embedded world it's perfectly fine to walk up to your software developer and say "Mike, we need you to write new firmware for this digital camera. Now, one thing --- there is no hardware cache coherency, so you have to keep that in mind when accessing DMA'ed data".On the desktop, the whole idea is to get away from known hardware. The whole job of an operating system is to provide a consistent and abstracted view of a whole range of hardware; Heck, AmigaDE was abstracting away the CPU, but even OS4 has a HAL and supposedly will provide the same APIs and behaviour on anything from Phase5 BlizzardPPC boards all the way to the AmigaOne/XY with a G9 which may be released in 2012. In *that* environment it's quite a lot harder to say "well, on one of the supported platforms, as far as your program is concerned, the order in which DMA'ed I/O operations happen is undetermined". That's not a consistent interface, and it's a large enough deviation from the expected behaviour that calling it "broken" doesn't seem too farfetched. |
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