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

Linus Torvalds
2007-07-20T22:53:17Z

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > * Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote:
> >
> > > I agree with Andi... it's quite nice to be able to leave some arch/i386
> > > stuff, and not carry it over to arch/x86-64.
> >
> > we can leave those few items in arch/x86 just as much. No need to keep
> > around a legacy tree for that.
>
> By extension it makes doing that sort of thing, in general, more difficult.
> Which is IMO not desirable.

I think it's *much* harder to carry legacy things around in an old tree
that almost nobody even uses any more (probably not true yet, but for most
of the main developers, I bet it will be true in a year). Especially one
that just duplicates 99% of the stuff.

There really isn't that much legacy crud. There are things like random
quirks, but every time I hear the (theoretical) argument about how much
time and effort we save by having it duplicated somewhere else, I think
about all the time we definitely waste by fixing the same bug twice (and
worry about the cases where we don't).

Linus