hardware independent hinv

[ariel@yon.engr.sgi.com (Ariel Faigon)]

Just forwarding since it sounds someone hopes that Linux/MIPS
will some day have a HW independent hinv... - Ariel

----- Forwarded message from Dave Olson -----

>From olson@anchor  Mon May 12 13:50:21 1997
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 13:50:18 -0700
From: olson@anchor (Dave Olson)
Message-Id: <199705122050.NAA26767@anchor.engr.sgi.com>
To: olson@anchor (Dave Olson), scotth@sgi.com
Subject: Re: missing machfile
Cc: swmgr@swmgr, breyer@swmgr, ariel@cthulhu
References: <199705121525.IAA23143@swmgr.engr.sgi.com>
    <199705121714.KAA23773@anchor.engr.sgi.com>
    <199705121854.LAA18312@anchor.engr.sgi.com>

|  I would assume that hinv is hardware-dependent, because of the
|  mapping issues?  Or is it table driven off of an analogue of the machtab?

Still all compiled in.  Bug/rfe open for years now about making it table
driven.

|  Unfortunately, nothing better is generally available across
|  platforms and releases.

Yes, and that's something that would be nice to fix.  Maybe linux will
do it, and we can copy them.

|  D> Lots, for any non-trivial app.  They don't have to, but often want to.
|  
|  ???  Non-trivial as in "big and powerful", or as in "gets close to
|  the hardware"?  I would argue that emacs and perl both fit the

Both/either.  Not all  big apps, of course.

|  I was looking at the options to uname, specifically "-p".  Based
|  upon the man page, shouldn't `uname -p` return "mips3" instead of
|  "mips" for my IP22?  That is one obvious meaning for:

Yes, but then you break even more of the configure scripts.  Again,
a no-win situation.

|  I was just curious is there was somehow we could make life easier
|  for configure scripts to port software for IRIX...  On the other
|  hand, we generally only get bad comments about /bin/install, and at
|  least we *don't* get comments like:

|  # AIX cpp loses on an empty file, so make sure it contains at least a newline.
Using cpp is a horrible solution...

|  It is hard to add functionality without breaking stuff.

A programmer's lament, if I ever heard one!

Dave Olson, Silicon Graphics   Guru and busybody at large
http://reality.sgi.com/olson   olson@sgi.com

----- End of forwarded message from Dave Olson -----

-- 
Peace, Ariel