Subject: Re: port-arm/28585: arm treats MACHINE differently than all other
To: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@netbsd.org>
From: Richard Earnshaw <Richard.Earnshaw@buzzard.freeserve.co.uk>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 12/08/2004 18:22:01
On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 10:26:08 CST, James Chacon <jmc@netbsd.org>  wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 11:50:18AM +0000, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> > The intention behind this change was to make all user-land code the same
> > across all ARM platforms.  Doing as you suggest would require having
> > different compiler binaries on each machine.  It then all goes downhill
> > from there.
> 
> It shouldn't be that case. MACHINE/MACHINE_ARCH are things which don't need
> exposing to userland at all. If something in userland needs them use
> sysctl/uname(3) to get them.
> 
> This should line up w. how other shared archs do things (ala m68k, powerpc,
> mips, etc) and none of them override MACHINE to some generic setting.

And how do you build uname into a cross compiler?  Answer: you can't.  So 
it *has* to be built into the compiler statically, and then the only 
answer that fits the one binary works on all platforms rule is to use 'arm'

R.