From: Christer W. <wi...@ac...> - 2002-03-08 23:48:45
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Dave Jones <da...@su...> 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 -- "Just how much can I get away with and still go to heaven?" |