The variable 'KERNEL_ARCH' is actually a normalized version of
'ARCH'/'BR2_ARCH'. For example, 'arcle' and 'arceb' both become 'arc', just
as all powerpc variants become 'powerpc'.
It is presumably called 'KERNEL_ARCH' because the Linux kernel is typically
the first place where support for a new architecture is added, and thus is
the entity that defines the normalized name.
However, the term 'KERNEL_ARCH' can also be interpreted as 'the architecture
used by the kernel', which need not be exactly the same as 'the normalized
name for a certain arch'. In particular, for cases where a 64-bit
architecture is running a 64-bit kernel but 32-bit userspace. Examples
include:
* aarch64 architecture, with aarch64 kernel and 32-bit (ARM) userspace
* x86_64 architecture, with x86_64 kernel and 32-bit (i386) userspace
In such cases, the 'architecture used by the kernel' needs to refer to the
64-bit name (aarch64, x86_64), whereas all userspace applications need to
refer the, potentially normalized, 32-bit name.
This means that there need to be two different variables:
KERNEL_ARCH: the architecture used by the kernel
NORMALIZED_ARCH: the normalized name for the current userspace architecture
At this moment, both will actually have the same content. But a subsequent
patch will add basic support for situations described above, in which
KERNEL_ARCH may become overwritten to the 64-bit architecture, while
NORMALIZED_ARCH needs to remain the same (32-bit) case.
This commit replaces use of KERNEL_ARCH where actually the userspace arch is
needed. Places that use KERNEL_ARCH in combination with building of kernel
modules are not touched.
There may be cases where a package builds both a kernel module as userspace,
in which case it may need to know about both KERNEL_ARCH and
NORMALIZED_ARCH, for the case where they differ. But this is to be fixed on
a per-need basis.
Signed-off-by: Thomas De Schampheleire <thomas.de_schampheleire@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Romain Naour <romain.naour@gmail.com>
[Arnout: Also rename BR2_KERNEL_ARCH to BR2_NORMALIZED_ARCH]
Signed-off-by: Arnout Vandecappelle (Essensium/Mind) <arnout@mind.be>
dd8a410eaf