Re Multi Arch Architecture

[DJBARROW at de dot ibm dot com]

Hi,
Nobody attempted to answer any of my questions I posted to you last week,

I'm most of the way through adding the multi arch definitions & am
absolutely convinced that
the 64 bit s390 port is less work. Who is responsible for implementing this
& worse still letting
it into the CVS repository & gdb-5.0, it appears to be only half thought
out.

1) For instance on linux/sparc & our up & coming 64 bit port we will be
able to run
32 bit applications & 64 bit applications on the 64 bit machine.
However the definitions of LONGEST & CORE_ADDR are still hard types in gdb
& so
you cannot switch between 32 bit applications & 64 bit applications with
this one copy of gdb
( which is the only use I can see for a multi arch gdb I can think of
unless you were working on some kind of
perverted machine with different types of processors ), this proble clearly
hasn't been sorted
out yet possibly 1000 man hours has been spent moving all the stuff to this
apparently broken code.

2) Everything done in the current GDB_MULTI_ARCH stuff could be done in a
similar automatically generated
way like ./configure does with autoconf m4 & other stuff using the original
gdb definitions in /config/arch/ by someone
with half a brain & willing to spend the 100+ man hours required to
implement it properly.

3) I have to pull a lot of definitions out of header files which I could
have used elsewhere.

4) Is it difficult to gdb bfd to work multi arch ???

In short I think the code was a lot better the way it was.

D.J. Barrow Linux for S/390 kernel developer
eMail: djbarrow@de.ibm.com,barrow_dj@yahoo.com
Phone: +49-(0)7031-16-2583
IBM Germany Lab, Schönaicherstr. 220, 71032 Böblingen