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SubjectRe: Patch for 2.2.10 (Quelle surprise!)
Date
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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