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Re: [MiNT] Shutdown() discussion - Conclusion

Hello!

Ok, this was a hot discussion. After talking to Petr a little bit I found
out that there are no much differences in the discussion points.

In Summary:

- user application access to NatFeats are a bad idea in general
  (e.g. bypassing the operating system negate the idea of the
  operating system; this is true for TOS, MagiC and especially
  FreeMiNT; today it's just normal that TOS isn't used without
  tons of TSR patches but that's the wrong way for sure too).

- the kernel support the existing hardware; aranym is also
  a special hardware and should be supported for optimal
  performance; this have *nothing* todo with kernel bloat,
  kernel bloat is a question of the implementation, e.g.
  good implementation - no bloat, bad implementation - much bloat;
  I'm sure that all developers aggree :-)

Finally some words about the NatFeats. Petr wasn't clear enough about his
goal and intentions. NatFeats should be a standard for emulators so that
not every emulator develop it's own extension. NatFeats are only useful
for operating system drivers to improve performance on the emulator. This
is a nice thing and that's why most emulators operate in such way.

Additionally there is also the idea to provide special high level features
like jpeg decoding and such things. This is a great idea too. To reach
this for user applications the operating system must provide these service
so that the applications can use this, for example introducing a /dev/jpeg
for jpeg encoding/decoding. These device can now be implemented as DSP
driver on Falcons or use a NatFeat on the emulator. As the device driver
is part of kernel it don't bypass the kernel and all security and
permission checks go the correct way. Just as an example. This was the
main idea of the aranym developers and I'm sure they agree that all
services must be integrated into the operating system for consistency (the
point where the hot discussion started I think).


Ciao
   ...Frank

--
ATARI FALCON 040 // MILAN 060
-----------------------------------------
http://www.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~fnaumann/
e-Mail: fnaumann@freemint.de