On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 10:33:30PM +0100, Dave Jones wrote:
> As a sidenote (sort of related topic) :
> An idea being kicked around a little right now is x86 subarch
> support for 2.5. With so many of the niche x86 spin-offs appearing
> lately, all fighting for their own piece of various files in
> arch/i386/kernel/, it may be time to do the same as the ARM folks did,
> and have..
>
> arch/i386/generic/
> arch/i386/numaq/
> arch/i386/visws
> arch/i386/voyager/
> etc..
YES!!!
I've been working on the Foster patches and keep thinking that this
would be the best solution to our current #ifdef hell.
> I've been meaning to find some time to move the necessary bits around,
> and jiggle configs to see how it would work out, but with a pending
> house move, I haven't got around to it yet.. Maybe next week.
>
> The downsides to this:
> - Code duplication.
> Some routines will likely be very similar if not identical.
> - Bug propagation.
> If something is fixed in one subarch, theres a high possibility
> it needs fixing in other subarchs
Make sure that every subarch has a maintainer/someone to blame who needs
to make sure their subarch also keeps up to date with the "generic" one
would help out a lot with this problem.
> The plus sides of this:
> - Removal of #ifdef noise
> With more and more of these subarchs appearing, this is getting
> more of an issue.
> - subarchs are free to do things 'their way' without affecting the
> common case.
I think Martin's recent CONFIG_MULTIQUAD patches prove that the plus
side would outweigh any possible downside :)
thanks,
greg k-h
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 22:00:10 EST