Re: [PATCH 00/18] Make common x86 arch area for i386 and x86_64 - Take 2

Ingo Molnar
2007-03-14T18:16:05Z

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> > symbolic links perhaps? In that case i'd also introduce a common
> > naming scheme: x86_early_printk.c - to make sure we know it right
> > away that those files are bi-arch.
>
> Hey, I know! This is a radical idea, but what if we put the name at
> the head of the file, and called it
>
> arch/x86/kernel/early_printk.c
>
> instead? Then we could teach each of i386 and x86-64 to include it
> from that area, and we could put other shared files under the same
> directory hierarchy so that it would be easy to see which ones are
> shared?

that is nice too, but it has some disadvantages as well in practice. For
example i often want to see 'everything' that belongs to an arch in just
one subdirectory. That way one can grep it for example, instead of
having to grep two separate places. Symlinks would be fine for that, but
an explicit split not really i think - unless we can get some really
significant chunk of code into that hierarchy, so that it makes
functional /sense/ to look at it in isolation.

with the prefix suggestion we can keep these 'shared' files merged in a
single, main functional tree (x86_64), but still have them marked in the
VFS as being shared. But ... either way is fine to me - no strong
feelings, really.

Ingo