Re: [Patch] asm workarounds in generic header files

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Tue Sep 09 2003 - 15:39:06 EST



On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, David Mosberger wrote:
>
> In my opinion, moving all the asm-stuff greatly improved readability
> of the source code. Especially for folks who are not intimately
> familiar with GCC asm syntax (which is hairy _and_ platform-specific).

I might agree, but "compiler.h" is getting increasingly messy, and this
just makes it worse (and sets the stage for making it even worse in the
future).

Is somebody willing to split up compiler.h into a per-compiler file (and
yes, I think "gcc-2.95" is a different compiler from "gcc-3.2" in this
case, since that is what most of the compiler.h #ifdef's are all about).

Then, have a config-time "set the right symbolic link" the same way we do
for "include/asm/", so that we can have a set of _clean_
compiler-dependent abstractions.

At that point, we can look at adding support for non-gcc compilers without
horrible problems. At least as long as the compiler otherwise is
"sufficiently good" (which clearly right now includes support for inline
assembly on most architectures).

Linus

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