Re: dropping CONFIG_IA32_SUPPORT from ia64

Matthew Wilcox
2006-05-25T00:05:50Z

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 02:23:18PM -0700, Luck, Tony wrote:
> > It doesn't feel right to me to remove functionality from machines
> > in the field and offer only a proprietary alternative.
>
> The alternative to dropping support for CONFIG_IA32_SUPPORT is
> to find someone to maintain it ... right now it doesn't get much
> of my time, so it is a ticking quagmire of untested code.

A twist on that theme is to merge the parts of ia32 emulation in the
ia64 kernel with the x86_64 architecture. Where that makes sense,
anyway. Large portions of the ia32 emulation are already common with
other CONFIG_COMPAT architectures, so reducing the amount of code
reduces the amount of potentially buggy code ;-)

A first step on that road would be to create one syscall table for
i386/ia32 emulation. Take a look at arch/parisc/kernel/syscall_table.S
for one approach to this. The interesting part to this is that some
syscalls seem to require different treatment on ia64 and x86_64 (last
time I looked at doing this anyway). That can be handled with some
additional ENTRY_ types.

I've been meaning to get round to this for a while, but somehow I never
quite have time.