> I did, in fact it was another reason that I posted the above. Consistent
> interfaces as suggested are well, fine, and good, but (XthreadX with UDI)
> you can't always maintain interface consistency when that interface is
> broken, as with the dev->flush() changes. And /proc/cpuinfo strikes me as
> an interface which may well have problems being simultaneously consistent
> and complete while addressing multiple CPU architecture families (heck, it's
> been a problem just between Intel, AMD, and Cyrix; should we be surprised at
> problems between x86 and PPC, Alpha, SPARC, ...?).
I *wouldn't* mind the difference so much if they'd made it use all lower
case letters *and* a space before the ':' and a space after that. Then I
would have no problems parsing the /proc/cpuinfo file at all.
i.e, on Amiga-Linux they have this horrible thing:
CPU: 68040
BogoMips: 16.58
whilst on Intel it's as:
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model_name : Pentium II
bogomips : 400.59
At least the Alpha /proc/cpuinfo is consistent with Intel, and the
PowerPC /proc/cpuinfo is consistent as well.
I suggest that someone should patch Linux m68k's /proc/cpuinfo for
consistency. I believe that should be as:
cpu : 68040
bogomips : 16.58
Then, it is trival to parse.
At the moment my program has a lot of #ifdefs to compile code for each
type of architecture that Linux runs on. I'd *love* to get rid of that and
have a nice generic function for parsing /proc/cpuinfo for *any* version
of Linux 2.1.x.
The uname() function works beautifully on all architectures and has no
#ifdefs. Why can't we have something like that for the cpuinfo stuff?
Maybe I'll devise an shared library (cpuinfo.so) which would have
cpuinfo() as a function that all programs could call to obtain the
hardware information. This IMHO would enhance independence of these
programs as they wouldn't have to worry about /proc/cpuinfo differences.
Comments anyone?
My current code is set up to return a struct for hardware information,
much like what uname() does, so it is quite portable, and I can easily
turn that into a library.
Cheers,
Alex
-- /\_/\ Legalise cannabis now! ( o.o ) Grow some cannabis today! > ^ < Peace, Love, Unity and Respect to all.http://www.tahallah.demon.co.uk - *new* - rewritten for text browser users!
Linux tahallah 2.1.122 #43 Sat Sep 19 10:54:36 EDT 1998 One AMD 486 DX/4 processor, 49.77 total bogomips, 32M RAM
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