From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Matthew Wilcox Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 00:05:50 +0000 Subject: Re: dropping CONFIG_IA32_SUPPORT from ia64 Message-Id: <20060525000550.GB12150@parisc-linux.org> List-Id: References: <200605241438.34303.bjorn.helgaas@hp.com> In-Reply-To: <200605241438.34303.bjorn.helgaas@hp.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org 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.