"This series kill the old i386 and x86_64 directories. The relevant files are moved and adapted and Kconfig.debug was consolidated (thanks to Randy)," Sam Ravnborg said, describing a set of 6 patches to finish the migration of physical files into the new x86 architecture directory. He described it as "a nice patch series that deletes more lines than it adds," going on to explain:

"I had to modify both the top-level Makefile and the kconfig Makefile to accomplish this. It was done in such a way that it is trivial for other archs to use the same mechanism should they have the need.

"To solve the defconfig issue (i386 and x86_64 cannot share one) the arch/x86/configs/ directory were introduced. This has been used by other archs for some time now but x86 had not had the need until now."

Sam Ravnborg took a look at the x86 unification patches and commented, "from the mails and discussions I expected it be be obvious what was i386 only, what was shared and what was x86_64 only." He listed 16 files in x86/pci and noted, "in the filename there is NOTHING for most of the non-shared code that tell that this file is used by only i386 or x86_64." Andi Kleen concurred, "exactly my point from KS. The big mash-up will not really make much difference in terms of Makefile clarity or whatever Thomas' point was. Apparently he wanted to eliminate a few lines of code from the Makefile and merge the header files completely?"

Linus Torvalds disagreed saying, "the problem right now is the *reverse* - even though they are in different subdirectories (and thus *look* like they are all separate), they aren't. So the merged end result is much better: at a first approximation everything is shared (largely true), and the ones that aren't shared can be made more obvious." He added, "at least things like "grep" will work sanely, and people will be *aware* that 'Oh, this touches a file that may be used by the other word-size'." Linus continued:

"Right now, we have people changing 'i386-only' files that turn out to be used by x86-64 too - through very subtle Makefile things that the person who only looks into the i386 Makefile will never even *see*.

"THAT is the problem (well, at least part of it)."