Messages in this thread | | | From | "Albert D. Cahalan" <> | Subject | Re: Patch for 2.2.10 (Quelle surprise!) | Date | Thu, 8 Jul 1999 20:12:13 -0400 (EDT) |
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Jes Sorensen writes:
>>> You still haven't explained why a syscall/sysctl is needed for >>> this when all the information can be obtained by parsing >>> /proc/cpuinfo ... > There is no point in it - the different architectures are just too > different and people put totally different things in > /proc/cpuinfo. Someone already suggested the m68k port for example > should change their format to make parsing easier for him (I cannot > remember who though) but there is absolutely no reason since we run > different systems. > > Looking at the example put forward so far, it is quite obvious that > the person suggesting it has not even looked at what other > architectures put in /proc/cpuinfo.
If an architecture doesn't report a cross-platform feature, there is a bug. I would expect to find out:
Is there any floating point hardware? How many processors are there? What is the BogoMIPS value?
These should also be provided if possible:
What is the clock speed? (rough estimate) (min, max, & current?) What company designed or produced the CPU? What is the CPU name? ("Pentium MMX") What is the version number? (5.4.3 for the Pentium MMX above)
Even the architecture-specific values should be in a common format. I ought to be able to write a nice GUI tool that displays a table of all the features, bugs, and interesting numbers. That would use a nice proportional font of course, so there would need to be a cross-platform way to tell labels apart from values. (else how can you align the columns right?)
Let's say I wrote software that would use MMX on ia32, AltiVec instructions on PowerPC, and VIS on the SPARC. I want to test for the appropriate feature at runtime. How? Must I write several parsers? I would want to collect my data with one cross-platform parser. Then I could just query for a "VIS" boolean.
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