[GSOC] Reliable multiarchitecture support

[James Hogan]

On 02/03/14 10:09, Philippe Ombredanne wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Edson Ticona
> <edson.ticona at jro.igp.gob.pe> wrote:
>> My name is Edson Ticona, I am going to start my master studies in
>> computer science in Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil (I
>> already have been accepted). I am currently working on the Jicamarca
>> Radio Observatory in Peru. These months I have been working with an
>> application for particle simulation that was written to run in Mac and
>> I had to adapt it to run in Linux. I found strace really useful for
>> completing my task because the app used some Mac specific libraries
>> that I had to replace.
>> Looking for the ideas page I would like to work on the reliable
>> multiarchitecture support.
>> I have experience developing kernel modules and started to read the
>> strace base code and I would appreciate some feedback about what
>> additional documentation might be useful.
> 
> Hi Edson!
> and thank you for showing up interest.
> About the reliable multiarch support project idead(and this may be
> useful for others student considering this idea too), grep the code
> for personality and PERSONALITIES.
> This should give you some ideas of the problem: for each os that
> supports executing multiple personalities -- typically 32 and 64
> variants -- there are a lot of preprocessors conditionals. The code to
> handle this is scattered especially in syscall.c ...
> I think Dmitry's idea would be to refactor such that we have a clean
> set of functions for a given personality grouped together that is
> overall simpler to read and maintain.
> Possibly using one .c per personality?
> 
> Dmitry, please elaborate.
> 
> As for testing on multiple architectures, check the qemu_multiarch_testing dir.
> 

In case anybody hasn't seen it, there's a discussion ATM on LKML
relating to annotating syscalls with the sorts of info that strace (and
other projects) need to interpret them.

Subject: Making a universal list of syscalls?
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.cross-arch/21821

Cheers
James