Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:02:18 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: Alexander Best <alexbestms@wwu.de> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [patch] teach the bootloader minor amd64 knowledge Message-ID: <201003221202.18683.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <permail-2010032215201080e26a0b000077bc-a_best01@message-id.uni-muenster.de> References: <permail-2010032215201080e26a0b000077bc-a_best01@message-id.uni-muenster.de>
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On Monday 22 March 2010 11:20:10 am Alexander Best wrote: > John Baldwin schrieb am 2010-03-22: > > On Monday 22 March 2010 9:50:05 am Alexander Best wrote: > > > hi there, > > > > since i386 and amd64 are sharing the same bootcode the bootloader > > > gets named > > > "FreeBSD/i386" on amd64 too. the following patch is a cosmetic > > > change to > > have > > > the bootloader identify itself as "FreeBSD/amd64" on amd64. > > > > any thoughts on this one? > > > I would not do this. They really are the same binary. You can take > > a > > /boot/loader built under FreeBSD/i386 and use it to load an amd64 > > kernel and > > vice versa. The one change I looked at doing a while back was > > renaming the > > i386/amd64 boot bits to identify themselves as 'FreeBSD/x86' rather > > than > > 'FreeBSD/i386'. > > sounds nice. however that would introduce some severe inconsistency, because > the term 'i386' is used in many places to define the x86 architecture (uname > -p/-m e.g.). also 'x86' related files/directories are called 'i386'. > > personally i'd like to see the term 'i386' completely replaced by 'x86' > throughout the whole freebsd code. > > if i'm not mistaken 80386 has been dropped in GENERIC in freebsd4 and entirely > in freebsd5. Ah, but 'x86' is commonly used now for things that are shared between i386 and amd64. See sys/x86 in HEAD, sys/arch/x86 in NetBSD, etc. I think even Linux has an x86 tree for shared code between i386 and x86_64. -- John Baldwin
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