On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Tim Rightnour wrote:

: Actually... this makes alot of sense to me..  A single sparc setup that would
: run on both ultra and non-ultra sparcs.  Isn't that more or less what Solaris
: does?

Through Solaris 2.6, yes.

: One could optionally use the 64bit kernel & userland on the 64bit capable
: machines.

Right.  Just that, even if they share code, the 32-bit version needs to
self-identify as simply a "sparc" (because, for all purposes, it is), and
the 64-bit version as "sparc64".  This keeps the MACHINE_ARCH split for
binary formats well defined.

(Yes, I know a 64-bit kernel can run 32-bit binaries, but that is
essentially an emulation, as you have a separate syscall layer to do all
those structure transformations.)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  http://www.wasabisystems.com/
-- Speed, stability, security, and support.  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.