machine/platform separation

[Thomas E. Spanjaard]

Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
Thomas E. Spanjaard wrote:
My point is, that nomenclature is not sensible, only commonly used. 
Though, I see no problem in supporting both TARGET_PLATFORM=foo and 
TARGET_ARCH=bar for the people that have a preference towards either 
of them.
this is not a beauty contest for architecture names.  this is about easy 
and concise categorization of our sources and targets.  and starting 
from there, using the "most commonly used" name for a particular purpose 
makes very much sense.
Easy, concise, correct and descriptive please :). Using what everyone 
else is using to remain compatible is good, at least for machine; 
however, the platform and associated subdirectory under sys/platform 
don't matter at all for such compatibility. They do however establish 
clear relationships between platforms, e.g., if you have pc32 and pc64 
it's easy to infer that the first is the 32bit PC platform, and the 
second the 64bit version of the first.

so, what is

cpu
CPU instruction set architecture (for i80386 and up, IA32; for IA32 
processors with AMD64/EM64T/IA32e/otherfancymarketingterm extensions, 
AMD64 or to a lesser extent IA32e).
machine
Aforementioned 'compatibility' moniker (i386, amd64).
arch
machine_arch
I think you can use these interchangably with machine.
platform
The name of a combination of a CPU ISA and a minimal set of other 
hardware and software making up a reasonably standardised system (e.g., 
a PC clone with IA32 processor)

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