[patch] teach the bootloader minor amd64 knowledge

[John Baldwin]

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