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SubjectRe: Patch for 2.2.10 (Quelle surprise!)
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>>>>> "Albert" == Albert D Cahalan <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> writes:

Albert> Jes Sorensen writes:
>> 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.

Albert> If an architecture doesn't report a cross-platform feature,
Albert> there is a bug. I would expect to find out:

Albert> Is there any floating point hardware? How many processors are
Albert> there? What is the BogoMIPS value?

What memory management unit is in the box ... oops that one does not
exist on the x86.

Albert> These should also be provided if possible:

Albert> What is the clock speed? (rough estimate) (min, max, &
Albert> current?) What company designed or produced the CPU? What is
Albert> the CPU name? ("Pentium MMX") What is the version number?
Albert> (5.4.3 for the Pentium MMX above)

Whats the memory bus speed, whats the cache speed, whats the cache
size (L1/L2/L3) etc etc, how much junk do you want down there.

Albert> Even the architecture-specific values should be in a common
Albert> format. I ought to be able to write a nice GUI tool that
Albert> displays a table of all the features, bugs, and interesting
Albert> numbers. That would use a nice proportional font of course, so
Albert> there would need to be a cross-platform way to tell labels
Albert> apart from values. (else how can you align the columns right?)

So you are saying that people should rewrite all existing tools so it
can be made easy for you to write a useless bells'n'whistles tool to
display things? No thank you very much.

Albert> Let's say I wrote software that would use MMX on ia32, AltiVec
Albert> instructions on PowerPC, and VIS on the SPARC. I want to test
Albert> for the appropriate feature at runtime. How? Must I write
Albert> several parsers? I would want to collect my data with one
Albert> cross-platform parser. Then I could just query for a "VIS"
Albert> boolean.

Oh how, you mean that all CPUs that provide something "VIS"-like
should report it as VIS? If you want to program something architecture
specific like VIS or MMX, then you already have to know how to deal
with it.

Jes

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