Just forwarding since it sounds someone hopes that Linux/MIPS
will some day have a HW independent hinv... - Ariel

Larry has shown me a perl script on his Linux/i386 box which does just
this.  I intend to supply the information required by such a script
via the proc filesystem.

  Ralf

----- Forwarded message from Dave Olson -----

quoted

From olson@anchor  Mon May 12 13:50:21 1997

Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 13:50:18 -0700
From: olson@anchor (Dave Olson)
Message-Id: [off-list ref]
To: olson@anchor (Dave Olson), scotth@sgi.com
Subject: Re: missing machfile
Cc: swmgr@swmgr, breyer@swmgr, ariel@cthulhu
References: [off-list ref]
    [off-list ref]
    [off-list ref]

|  I would assume that hinv is hardware-dependent, because of the
|  mapping issues?  Or is it table driven off of an analogue of the machtab?

Still all compiled in.  Bug/rfe open for years now about making it table
driven.

|  Unfortunately, nothing better is generally available across
|  platforms and releases.

Yes, and that's something that would be nice to fix.  Maybe linux will
do it, and we can copy them.

|  D> Lots, for any non-trivial app.  They don't have to, but often want to.
|  
|  ???  Non-trivial as in "big and powerful", or as in "gets close to
|  the hardware"?  I would argue that emacs and perl both fit the

Both/either.  Not all  big apps, of course.

|  I was looking at the options to uname, specifically "-p".  Based
|  upon the man page, shouldn't `uname -p` return "mips3" instead of
|  "mips" for my IP22?  That is one obvious meaning for:

Q: what exactly does that IP?? notation stand for?  Internal model names,
CPU modules, ???

Yes, but then you break even more of the configure scripts.  Again,
a no-win situation.

You're absolutely right.  For just that reason I changed the output for
little endian MIPS boxes from mipsel to mips a long time ago though
mipsel is logic when thinking of the generic GNU configuration names.

|  I was just curious is there was somehow we could make life easier
|  for configure scripts to port software for IRIX...  On the other
|  hand, we generally only get bad comments about /bin/install, and at
|  least we *don't* get comments like:

After the last few days I can say that porting to IRIX is a quite boring
job; most things just work.  Only ssh makes problem.  Solved by using
GCC (snapshot) instead of SGI's cc.

Using cpp is a horrible solution...

Tell the people who invented imake ...

|  It is hard to add functionality without breaking stuff.

A programmer's lament, if I ever heard one!

Or break what's broken ...

  Ralf