From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from rwcrmhc13.comcast.net (rwcrmhc13.comcast.net [204.127.198.39]) by ozlabs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 317D567A5D for ; Sat, 22 Jan 2005 01:45:08 +1100 (EST) Message-ID: <41F11439.4050303@acm.org> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 08:39:53 -0600 From: Corey Minyard MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Geert Uytterhoeven References: <41EC29A8.1040703@mvista.com> <1106259956.18397.10.camel@gaston> <41F0449C.5020603@mvista.com> <1106265672.5387.14.camel@gaston> <41F04849.70506@mvista.com> <1106266338.18397.21.camel@gaston> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Cc: linuxppc-dev list Subject: Re: [RFC] Option to disable mapping genrtc calls to ppc_md calls List-Id: Linux on PowerPC Developers Mail List List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: >On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > > >>On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 17:09 -0700, Mark A. Greer wrote: >> >> >>>Yes but as I wrote, I don't have time right now. >>> >>> >> ... which is exactly my rant ... embedded companies never have time >>to do the right thing... >> >> > >Because they have strict (paid for) deadlines, unlike the `we do it for >fun'-crowd led by Linus ;-) > > [begin soapbox] I disagree with this attitude. I believe there is a balance to be struck between doing things right and meeting deadlines, and I believe the embedded hardware companies are way too far off on the meeting deadlines side of things. From what I can tell, they tend to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. (They do things that save them a little bit of money in one area and cost a lot in another area.) This is, of course, a generalization. I see some good things happening in some areas. IMHO, this is due to the fact that these are mostly run by hardware engineers and software is an afterthought. For instance, I have dealt with one company who used a non-standard interface where a standard one was available. They probably saved 1-2 dollars per board. This change probably cost $150,000 in software costs. There is no way they will sell close to 75,000 boards. Penny-wise, pound-foolish. And they have 10-20 years of support for this non-standard hack. The more consistent you make things, the lower the software cost. When you follow standards, it lowers software costs. Software is *expensive* to create; the more you can reuse what is there, the better off you are. It seems to me that the PPC hardware vendors have spent 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars in software costs that were really kind of pointless. If things were more standard and consistent, things would work just as well (and almost certainly better) and the cost would be much lower. Then us software folks who work on embedded linux could work on making things better instead of chasing new board ports. As I mentioned, there is a balance here. If you are selling, 10 million units, saving a dollar per unit at the cost of $150,000 in software is well worth it. If you can get a 50% improvement in performance, it's probably worth it. But to gain no benefit, cost yourself a lot of money, and reduce your reliability (new software is generally less reliable than old), well, that sounds silly to me. [end soapbox] After saying this, I don't know how to fix the PPC world. But every customization that requires software changes is one more reason for people to use x86 (where new boards "just work" but can be tuned for performance) and not PPC (where new boards are pain and suffering to get working and there is no time to tune them for performance). -Corey