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

Glauber de Oliveira Costa
2007-07-21T02:40:00Z

On 7/20/07, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:

> > I really like the idea of a unified source tree for the 2 x86 variants.
> > The technical differences are really small (of course there are
> > differences, especially in the boot sequence), and striving to unify as
> > much as possible while having a clean way to do per 32/64 bit parts as
> > well is something that imo is the right thing.
> >
>
> Not to mention all the paravirt stuff that's going on. Having a single
> x86 arch to work with would be greatly beneficial to the work being done
> to port paravirt to x86_64.

As for paravirt, it'd really help. As I had the tree lagged behind by
so much, a great part of the work now is checking where i386 is,
seeing if it applies for 64-bit, and so on. The differences are not so
huge, and I'm trying my best to not let them deviate too much. It
could mostly be built incrementally.

And I bet a huge part of the tree could be like this too: In most
places, they are different for no particular reason, just because two
people implemented it separately. There'd be a huge effort to bring
those differences into an end, but I think I'd pay in future
development speed. (not to mention the duplicate bugs linus have
already talked about)

> Way to go, Thomas and Ingo!
I am pretty much for it too.

--
Glauber de Oliveira Costa.
"Free as in Freedom"
http://glommer.net

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."