platform/pc64 will be dropped
Matthew Dillon
dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Thu Aug 23 10:45:49 PDT 2007
Guys guys, don't get ahead of yourselves. I investigated this a while
ago and while there are many bits which are similar, they are not anywhere
near the same.
There are major assumptions with regards to whether variables are 32 bits
or 64 bits wide. The one thing we *CANNOT* afford to do is to start
screwing around with the pc32 code to make it compatible with pc64. The
pc64 work has to be able to progress without any chance of it interfering
with the 32 bit code.
Certainly there are bits in pc32 that could be made machine-independant.
Originally there was a ton of MI code in pc32, inherited from the FreeBSD
tree, and while I've moved some of it out I haven't gotten all of it.
Similarly, some bits of pc32 can be moved to the cpu hierarchy... but
ONLY those bits that are also needed by the virtual kernel (otherwise
they ARE platform and not cpu specific bits and have to stay in pc32).
There will be some near duplication of code but the purpose of having
pc64 is to provide a place where work can progress without causing the
pc32 builds to start failing and crashing.
-Matt
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