Dave Jones <davej@suse.de> writes:
> On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 01:08:18PM -0800, Patricia Gaughen wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm currently working on a discontigmem patch for IBM NUMAQ (an ia32
> > NUMA box) and want to reuse the standard i386 code as much as
> > possible. To achieve this, I've modularized setup_arch() and
> > mem_init(). This modularization is what the patch that I've included
> > in this email contains.
>
> 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..
I will tenatively vote in favor of this kind of action. There
are a couple of directions to consider. This is a two dimensional
problem.
Dimension 1. Different basic hardware architectures.
(pc,numaq,visws,voyager)
Dimension 2. Different firmware implementations.
(pcbios,linuxbios,openfirmware,acpi?)
And beyond that it is fairly important to be able to build a generic
kernel. That works on everything. You might have to specify a
command line parameter to tell it which arch it is really running on
but it should work.
>From working with the alpha I can say that it is just nasty when you
must have per motherboard information in your kernel. Generally life
is much more pleasant if a small handful of things like irq routing
information is provided by the firmware so you only have to code for a
specific hardware device, and not a specific motherboard.
And even if we get to the point of putting in motherboard specific
code I would suggest it just provide the information like irq routing,
and which superio chips are present and allow a more generic layer to
handle their setup.
Anyway on the multiplexing the firmware score I have just done the
heavy lifting needed so we can put the firmware switching logic
all in C code.
Eric
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 22:00:13 EST