From owner-freebsd-arch Tue May 7 16:35:12 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 29F2937B404; Tue, 7 May 2002 16:35:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from apollo.backplane.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by apollo.backplane.com (8.12.3/8.9.1) with ESMTP id g47NZ8hU001372; Tue, 7 May 2002 16:35:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.12.3/8.12.3/Submit) id g47NZ8FY001371; Tue, 7 May 2002 16:35:08 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 16:35:08 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200205072335.g47NZ8FY001371@apollo.backplane.com> To: "David O'Brien" Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syscall changes to deal with 32->64 changes. References: <200205071940.g47Jehl84130@apollo.backplane.com> <20020507131314.B29014@dragon.nuxi.com> <200205072106.g47L6YuT000379@apollo.backplane.com> <20020507161730.A31409@dragon.nuxi.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG : :On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 02:06:34PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote: :> :> : :> :On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 12:40:43PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote: :> :> the way for us to allow natively compiled multi-architectural support. :> :> e.g. consider this: :> :> :> :> cc -ABI4 ... :> :> cc -ABI5 ... :> :> cc -ABILinux ... :> :> cc -ABIOpenBSD ... :> : :> :Honestly, why do we have this need? It seems to fall into the "it would :> :be nice"; but seldomly used. :> :> Well, how do you intend to test the new ABI vector? : :One moves forward and does not look back. Uh huh. Well, I have some experience with that when I tried changing one of my test boxes over to a 64 bit time_t. I wound up having to wipe the entire machine (raw dd from the backup partition). Twice. To be blunt, making incremental changes and still having a working system at the end of the day required extremely careful attention to detail, and I made two mistakes over the period of several days that I couldn't back out of. In otherwords, my considered opinion is that it would actually be *easier* to do the relatively modest amount of work required to generalize the ABI linkage in order to save a whole lot more work down the line when people actually try to test it. I will note that what I am suggesting is considerably less work then the more radical suggestion Poul had (note: I have no specific opinion on Poul's radical suggestion at this time). -Matt Matthew Dillon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message