matthew green wrote:
   >the reason it's done the way it is today is that the sparc and sparc64
   >ports are separate - we have arch/sparc and arch/sparc64, and that name
   >has traditionally always been the $MACHINE in netbsd, so way back when
   >we chose to always use "sparc64" on sun4u machines, and let $MACHINE_ARCH
   >be used for deciding the native binary format.
   
   As a comparison, what happens if you run arch/i386 on an AMD64 machine ?


it comes up as i386.  however, it's not really the same thing.  you
can't run a sparc kernel on a sparc64 machine.  you have to run a
32 bit sparc64 kernel.  the kernel-side of things is *very*
different in sun4u land, regardless of bit-size.

you actually *do* run netbsd/i386 on amd64.  you run netbsd/sparc64
(kernel) on a sun4u whether it's 32 or 64 bit...


(to be totally honest, if we were to make a change along these lines
i think we should do it for sparc64 as well, and deprecate the
separate port as well -- just have "netbsd/sparc" that supports
building both 32 and 64 bit versions for either hardware level.)


.mrg.