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

Ingo Molnar
2007-03-14T18:10:04Z

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

> Did you even *look* at the patches?

yes. I am strongly in favor of sharing code - i recently introduced
arch/x86_64/kernel/tsc_sync.c that is shared by i386 too.

So first i wrote a draft email where i told Andi that he's on crack to
NACK it so brutally and that we should clearly do arch/x86 ;-)

then i decided to analyze the patches: currently they move 13452 lines
of code. i386 is 87847 lines of code, x86_64 is 40978 lines of code, a
total of 128825. That means we move about 10% of the code. Not
insignificant but not earth-shattering either. With alot more effort
(and testing) we could realistically go up to maybe 20% - but that's
still a bit low to spread out all the files, isnt it?

in comparison, arch/powerpc is 159099 lines of code, arch/ppc is 106598
lines of code. So the sharing factor is quite a bit higher there. I dont
think we could ever reach that with x86.

So i thought it's a better idea to continue with the current more
finegrained scheme of sharing some files between the architectures by
having arch/x86_64 be the 'main' repository, with i386 inheriting them
back, instead of spreading out the files?

but, whichever variant happens, it's certainly fine to me :)

Ingo