Re: [RFC, Announce] Unified x86 architecture, arch/x86

Ingo Molnar
2007-07-21T12:31:15Z

* Brian Gerst <bgerst@didntduck.org> wrote:

> > And there is more of that, when you take the time and look closely
> > at the _32.[ch] _64.[ch] files which are created by the merge.
>
> Looking at the include files, many more are near-identical in trivial
> ways, such as whitespace, comments, local variable names, or guard
> #ifdefs.

yeah. And by moving them next to each other, people actually have the
real incentive to look and ponder: "these two files do similar things
but they look so different. Does it _have_ to be so?". Often the answer
is: no, it could really be shared.

And even when things will continue to be different, it's nice to have
them side by side for documentation purposes as well. "we do this
differently on 64-bit, because ...".

Key to starting all these cleanups is to create plain and simple
physical proximity - and our transition arch/x86 and include/asm-x86
achieves that - nothing more, nothing less.

Ingo