Quoting Ali Saidi <[email protected]>:
On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:24:12 -0700, nathan binkert <[email protected]> wrote:
The bottom line is that I think Platform is mostly historical, but I don't
know the history, so maybe for starters someone like Nate or Ali
could bring
me up to speed...
I believe that there is no good reason for Platform to be separate to System
and I think that we should do as you say and have a System object that does
both.
Nate
The reason for the platform is to separate the ISA from the
implementation of the hw implementation that runs that ISA. For
example if we think back to turbo laser, tsunami, alpha, linux and
tru64. We have AlphaSystem, and then AlphaLinuxSystem and
AlphaTru64System for the two operating systems. The platform
provided an interface to interrupts and i/o so you could build a
tsunami system that booted Linux or Tru64 or a Tlaser system that
booted either. Otherwise there isn't a clear object hierarchy that
can be built (some combination is going to result in a lot of code
duplication).The Tusnami and the TLaser system had very different
ways of handling interrupt and the translating memory for DMA, so
there needs to be some specialization.
Ali
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Yeah, I think this is right. The platform object is a hub for the
hardware aspects of a machine, and the system object is a hub for the
software aspects. You can have Linux on platform X, Solaris on
platform Y, etc., and by having two halves to stick together then you
can mix and match without having to have a cross product of classes
with gobs of duplication. The problem I'm solving here is to remove
the bidirectional linkage between a system object and a platform
object. In SE mode, there are software components but (probably) no
hardware components perse.
Gabe
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