Re: [RFC, Announce] Unified x86 architecture, arch/x86

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
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