Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Patch for 2.2.10 (Quelle surprise!) | From | Jes Sorensen <> | Date | 09 Jul 1999 09:41:51 +0200 |
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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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