DragonFly kernel List (threaded) for 2007-01
DragonFly BSD
DragonFly kernel List (threaded) for 2007-01
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Re: machine/platform separation


From: "Thomas E. Spanjaard" <tgen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:52:53 +0000

Matthew Dillon wrote:
Thomas E. Spanjaard wrote:
:At least 'i386' sucks as platform name. It's not true anymore that all :IA32 (yes, that's the CPU arch name Intel actually uses these days) CPUs :live in PC machines, and picking 'i386' as name for the machine with a :PC BIOS and an IA32 CPU is just confusing baggage. What would you name :the EFI+IA32 machine? efi386? mac386 (hah, wait 'til other manufacturers :start shipping IA32 boxen with EFI firmware)? And the (hypothetical?) :case of OFW+IA32?
:Ofcourse, the rest of the world is still retarded, and we need to deal :with that. But going for 'i386' and 'amd64' is basically going for the :lowest common denominator. Sure, it's 'common practice', a 'de facto :standard', but it's WRONG.
Part of the problem is that I only separated the code into two
physical pieces (cpu and machine architectures) when I should have
separated it into three (cpu, machine, and platform). At the time I
felt three was too many. I even created three built-in MAKE variables,
I just named them badly and didn't go far enough.

Introducing a third variable would certainly work around the issue, as you can keep 'machine' compatible with the rest of the world (e.g. for gcc host/target selection, uname -m output, etc), without having to give up the ideal of The Right Name For The Animal.


This will take a bit of CVS surgery
(I have to rename /usr/src/sys/machine to /usr/src/sys/platform). I
guess I should probably do it before we branch, which means delaying the
branch until Friday-ish (but not delaying the release which is still going to be ~2 weeks).

Let's hope the week that's left for stabilising if necessary is enough :).


Cheers,
--
        Thomas E. Spanjaard
        tgen@netphreax.net

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