Re: The virtuailization patches break Voyager.

[Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>]

On Saturday 28 April 2007 11:15:33 Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> writes:
> 
> > On Saturday 28 April 2007 09:52:30 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> >> Well, not really. The problem with the subarch mechanism is that it
> >> promotes a lot of copied code with small modifications, and so making
> >> changes is the inherently non-general activity of trying to find all the
> >> various copies, work out what subtle differences they have, and try to
> >> make the appropriate changes in each case. This was one of the major
> >> objections to the original Xen-as-subarch patches, and it is the problem
> >> with Voyager. The mass of preprocessor tricks doesn't help either.
> >
> > Yes I agree. Current i386 subarch is a mess and I hope to slowly phase
> > it out. mach-{es7000,summit} should just be folded into mach-generic
> > always (like x86-64) and I'm somewhat hoping that mach-voyager and 
> > perhaps mach-visws too will just go away at some point.
> 
> There is a possibility, that arch/i386 will seen renewed life as an
> embedded architecture.  At which point things like mach-visws may
> start proliferating.

Scary thought. But I don't see why people using embedded x86s should suddenly
design new interrupt controllers etc. - after all the main value of using x86s
embedded is some degree of compatibility to PC software.  Ok, we'll see what
happens.
 
> So I think it makes a lot of sense to see if we can fold mach-visws
> and mach-voyager into appropriate pluggable interfaces.

For voyager and NUMAQ i think it's fine to just wait until the last machine dies
(James, how many do you have left? @] iirc the number of NUMAQs still in operation
is also slowly decreasing) 
 
-Andi