Open Bug 1780935 Opened 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago

x86 and x86_64 should probably not be called INTEL_ARCHITECTURE

Categories

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement, P5)

Unspecified
All
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: athenian200, Unassigned)

Details

This is not a major issue, but it is something that's kind of bothered me for a while now. The build system uses the INTEL_ARCHITECTURE flag to refer to both x86 and x86_64 as a pair.

The issue is, this is technically incorrect and could lead to ambiguity or misunderstanding. That particular name would make anyone familiar with Intel's product line over the years think of IA-32 and IA-64, which would refer to x86 and Itanium. So the term is only half-correctly used here... IA-32 is x86, but IA-64 is Itanium. x86_64 was developed by AMD and is also known as AMD64, and it technically isn't an Intel architecture at all. It's confusing I know, but AMD is licensing x86 from Intel, and Intel is licensing the AMD64 extensions from AMD. Neither one could build modern processors as we know them without that agreement.

I happened to check how often it's used, and it seems that this is only used a handful of times in your codebase. So in theory it shouldn't be that hard to remove or change.

I mean, if y'all want to leave it the way it is because of precedent, I completely understand, but I couldn't find any other bugs suggesting this that were closed as WONTFIX, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask.

That seems reasonable. Feel free to submit a patch with a rename to an appropriate alternative. You can set me as the reviewer.

Severity: -- → S4
Priority: -- → P5
Component: Bootstrap Configuration → General
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