On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 02:39:33PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > > > What we have currently is a bunch of hacks. Seems that people can't make > > up their mind to what to do.
I think they work fine. I don't like such large scale renaming -- they are a pain for anybody with external patches and make regression hunting later painful. And the gain is about zero as far as I can see. It won't fix a single bug, just cause pain. > > I don't mind the patches, but I'd be a lot happier if it also was a stated > intention to actually make it be buildable as "x86", the same way that the > separate 32-bit and 64-bit POWER architectures were merged into just one > architecture that could be built either way. I've thought about it, but it would be a lot of work and regression test on old hardware would be a nightmare. Besides still x86-64 is a lot cleaner than i386 and imho easier to hack and with all the 32bit quirks readded it would probably become worse than current i386. The only good option would be a "modern 32bit only" but even that gets complicated quickly when you consider all the corner cases. And a clean 32bit port wouldn't cover enough hardware to be usable by distributions. And I also don't have really time to work on that. > The "32-bit code has legcay issues" thing that Andi complained about (eg > there's no guarantee of a HPET on 32-bit x86) doesn't really change the Most 64bit doesn't neither. > fact that yes, we have to support those legacy issues *anyway*, and 64-bit > x86 certainly has its set of issues already too. Yes :/ The more supported systems, the more junk. The recent nmi watchdog issues are a good example. All just because a few vendors write crappy AML/SMM code. > We've started to notice that the i386 build gets broken now that most > developers tend to have newer CPU's and run mostly on x86-64 (and yes, > that's me too), and while I don't think unifying things will guarantee > that doesn't happen in the future, it will hopefully at least help make it > not get much *worse*. Build test would be needed anyways, doesn't make much difference I guess. > As it is, the build environment has to know to pass in "-m32/-m64" > anyway.. It already does that. -Andi - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
