Subject: Re: [RFC, Announce] Unified x86 architecture, arch/x86
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2007-07-21 05:37:58 GMT (1 year, 12 weeks, 1 day, 20 hours and 23 minutes ago)
On Saturday 21 July 2007 00:32, Thomas Gleixner wrote: > We are pleased to announce a project we've been working on for some > time: the unified x86 architecture tree, or "arch/x86" - and we'd like > to solicit feedback about it. Well you know my position on this. I think it's a bad idea because it means we can never get rid of any old junk. IMNSHO arch/x86_64 is significantly cleaner and simpler in many ways than arch/i386 and I would like to preserve that. Also in general arch/x86_64 is much easier to hack than arch/i386 because it's easier to regression test and in general has to care about much less junk. And I don't know of any way to ever fix that for i386 besides splitting the old stuff off completely. Besides radical file movements like this are bad anyways. They cause a big break in patchkits and forward/backwards porting that doesn't really help anybody. > This causes double maintenance > even for functionality that is conceptually the same for the 32-bit and > the 64-bit tree. (such as support for standard PC platform architecture > devices) It's not really the same platform: one is PC hardware going back forever with zillions of bugs, the other is modern PC platforms which much less bugs and quirks To see it otherwise it's more a junkification of arch/x86_64 than a cleanup of arch/i386 -- in fact you didn't really clean up arch/i386 at all. > How did we do it? > ----------------- > > As an initial matter, we made it painstakingly sure that the resulting > .o files in a 32-bit build are bit for bit equal. You got not a single line less code duplication then, so i don't really see the point of this. -Andi