On 07/07/2012 03:27 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Saturday 07 July 2012, Olof Johansson wrote: > >>> ARM introduced AArch64 as part of the ARMv8 architecture >> >> With the risk of bikeshedding here, but I find the name awkward. How >> about just naming the arch port arm64 instead? It's considerably more >> descriptive in the context of the kernel. For reference, we didn't >> name ppc64, nor powerpc, after what the IBM/power.org marketing people >> were currently calling the architecture at the time either. > > I agree the name sucks, and I'd much prefer to just call it arm64 > as well. The main advantage of the aarch64 name is that it's the > same as the identifier in the elf triplet, and it makes sense to > keep the same name for all places where we need to identify the > architecture. This also includes the rpm and dpkg architecture names, > and the string returned by the uname syscall. If everything else > is aarch64, we should use that in the kernel directory too, but > if everyone calls it arm64 anyway, we should probably use that name > for as many things as possible.
FWIW I actually really like the aarch64 name (but you know that already :) ). I think it clearly spells out that this is not just a 64-bit extension to the existing 32-bit ARM Architecture, it is a new (inspired by ARM) architecture. Implementations will also run in AArch32 state (A32 and T32), but it's not like x86->x86_64. In our bikeshedding conversations pondering future Fedora support, we've pretty much settled on the aarch64 name now, and the hope is that we can also avoid providing 32-bit compatibility (multi-arch) by relying on virtualized guests for any 32-bit story. If that holds, we have some flexibility to e.g. go for 64K page size, etc. if we want. Jon. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/