rename to freebsd-powerpc?

[Aron J. Silverton]

Benno Rice wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 21:56, David Leimbach wrote:
> 
>>Well is the goal to support "all" PowerPC or just Macintosh?
> 
> 
> The goal is to be as generic as we can be.
> 
> 
>>There are a ton of VME PowerPC boards out there and some
>>RS/6000s that might be able to run FreeBSD as well.
> 
> 
> Yep.  The issue is getting someone with the time to do the work who has
> access to that hardware.
> 
> 
>>What is the goal of people on this list?   If its just mac-powerpc
>>perhaps that is the way to go?  Of course if Apple actually releases
>>a Mac based on PPC-970 [64 bit PPC CPU] then we might get more confusion
>>with Mac-PowerPC. :)
>>
>>Technically I think PPC is fine, powerpc is better but it may not
>>really be more specific :).
> 
> 
> And PPC is more specific?  PowerPC is the name of the specification that
> all of these processors follow, whether it's the 32-bit or 64-bit OEA
> specifications or the weird variants like the IBM 4xx's they're all
> called PowerPC.  Since we have a driver in the system called ppc which
> handles PC parallel port stuff, I've always made a concious effort to
> refer to the platform as powerpc rather than ppc.  It's also the name of
> the directory in which the arch-specific code resides.
> 
> The idea of the codebase is to support as many PowerPC platforms as we
> can, so I think that's the right name for it.
> 

Looking at two recent internal invoices on my desk, I see that we refer 
to the chips as both PPC and PowerPC.  I agree with Benno and DES, 
however, with regards to changing the name of the list.  For my part, 
I'll probably continue to type PPC in conversation, though. ;-)

I like the idea of keeping it as -powerpc as opposed to differentiating 
between, for example, CompactPCI, MVME, Motorola, IBM, Apple, Artesyn, 
or other distint PowerPC-based boards.  Isn't that what NetBSD does? 
It's probably not necessary here.  I'd rather just list the supported 
boards and architectures as a subset of FreeBSD-PowerPC.

Of course I have yet to contribute to the effort, so feel free to ignore 
me.  I do hope to contribute real soon now.

Aron

-- 
Aron J. Silverton
Senior Staff Research Engineer
Motorola Laboratories, Networks and Infrastructure Research
Motorola, Inc.