Garrett D'Amore writes:
> Quite honestly, I don't think any of the ARC members are going to spend
> vast amounts of time poring over every detail of the ABI, your cache
> architecture, memory organization, etc. You should describe the parts
> that people need to know about to be able to use the platform, but you
> probably don't need to go into *too* much detail.
The parts that people will pore over are the things that affect the
rest of the system architecture. These things include:
- Differences between the new ABI and existing ABIs that amount to
software incompatibilities. As an example, the default-unsigned
'char' in PPC (where the rest of the world uses signed) was
debated at length, because of the substantial risk of software
breakage and/or non-portability. (Yes, obviously, "well-written"
software doesn't face that sort of obstacle. But not all
applications that users have become attached to are in fact
well-written. Some are downright horrible, but are still used.)
- Differences in the hardware behavior that affect software
portability. For example, if your new system could address only
words and not bytes, or if it had some hitherto unknown alignment
restrictions, then we'd probably want to know about that.
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
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