Dave Jones <davej@suse.de> 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 please. I've been working with at least 4 different National
Semiconductor Geode based designs so far, and they will get more and
more common I belive. It'd be nice not having to crap in the rest of
the i386 tree just because one system has its own bootloader or
special motherboard.
I just got my SC2200 based board booting with LinuxBIOS, so I'll
probably have to do a special kernel initialization that does some
board-specific setup since there is no BIOS to do that.
> 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
Couldn't this be done with a common subroutine library, such as
arch/i386/common that contains code to set up the interrupt controller
and such. The PC platform code just includes everything, other
platforms could be a bit more choosy, have its own bootloader and
memory detection code and just skip the BIOS calls.
/Christer
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 22:00:11 EST