Re: machine/platform separation

["Thomas E. Spanjaard" <tgen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> Thomas E. Spanjaard wrote:
> :At least 'i386' sucks as platform name. It's not true anymore that all 
> :IA32 (yes, that's the CPU arch name Intel actually uses these days) CPUs 
> :live in PC machines, and picking 'i386' as name for the machine with a 
> :PC BIOS and an IA32 CPU is just confusing baggage. What would you name 
> :the EFI+IA32 machine? efi386? mac386 (hah, wait 'til other manufacturers 
> :start shipping IA32 boxen with EFI firmware)? And the (hypothetical?) 
> :case of OFW+IA32?
> :Ofcourse, the rest of the world is still retarded, and we need to deal 
> :with that. But going for 'i386' and 'amd64' is basically going for the 
> :lowest common denominator. Sure, it's 'common practice', a 'de facto 
> :standard', but it's WRONG.
>     Part of the problem is that I only separated the code into two
>     physical pieces (cpu and machine architectures) when I should have
>     separated it into three (cpu, machine, and platform).  At the time I
>     felt three was too many.  I even created three built-in MAKE variables,
>     I just named them badly and didn't go far enough.

Introducing a third variable would certainly work around the issue, as 
you can keep 'machine' compatible with the rest of the world (e.g. for 
gcc host/target selection, uname -m output, etc), without having to give 
up the ideal of The Right Name For The Animal.

>     This will take a bit of CVS surgery
>     (I have to rename /usr/src/sys/machine to /usr/src/sys/platform).  I
>     guess I should probably do it before we branch, which means delaying the
>     branch until Friday-ish (but not delaying the release which is still 
>     going to be ~2 weeks).

Let's hope the week that's left for stabilising if necessary is enough :).

Cheers,
--
        Thomas E. Spanjaard
        tgen@netphreax.net

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