Date: Sun, 5 Oct 1997 17:14:44 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii To: Ruiter de M cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: uname and processor type? In-Reply-To: <612gqs$ar4$1@star.cs.vu.nl> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On 3 Oct 1997, Ruiter de M wrote: > OK, let me explain why I ask this. It's not that *I* want to know what > processor I have (I already know that :), but people or programs > (config.guess) do. If they use 'uname' they don't want to know it's a > PC (MS-DOS for OS says enough about that), but also what processor > is used. > > So maybe the maintainer/DJGPP-porter of uname (shellutils? => Eli? I > can't remember right now) can integrate some extra ID-procedures in > uname, to make it more useful. AFAIK, in our case, the config.guess script doesn't really care what it gets as the CPU part of the system name. DJGPP only runs on the x86 family of processors, and that is all configuration scripts need to know. The CPU part is important for those cases where the operating system's name doesn't identify the configuration unambigously. For example, Solaris can run on x86 or on Sun's Sparc processors. (FWIW, most GNU packages don't even call config.guess as part of the configure script, at least for now.) So I don't see any special importance to having `uname' report the CPU make. If `pc' is too dull, we can always change it to `80x86' (or even `i[3456789]86', if we feel ambitious ;-). It's just a static string buried inside some libc function. Btw, I think it's a bad idea to have the CPUID code incorporated into `uname' or any library function, because the identification code issues some tricky and obscure instructions that could fail/crash in protected mode (like under Windows). IMHO, it is better to produce dull but satisfactory results than to crash. (And believe me, I know all about the wounded pride of an owner of a brand-new Pentium II when `uname' tells them they still have the same `pc' they did before...)