machine/platform separation

[Thomas E. Spanjaard]

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 at netphreax.net
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