[patch] teach the bootloader minor amd64 knowledge

[Alexander Best]

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.

-- 
Alexander Best