Questions about --with-alpha and --with-armeb configure flags

[Steve Grubb]

On Friday, November 16, 2012 06:00:56 PM Laurent Bigonville wrote:
> I've several questions about the --with-alpha and --with-armeb
> build-time flags.
> 
> 1) are --with-alpha and --with-armeb intended to be enabled only on
> these architectures on could they also be enabled on any other one?

If you have an aggregating server and you want to make sense of the syscalls 
on these arches, then you might want them enabled. To my knowledge, Fedora 
never made an Alpha process distribution so it would be waste to enable that. 
I suppose there is a remote possibility that some other distribution did and 
it might get aggregated to a Fedora machine, but no one has ever complained.

> If I understand correctly it's only adding arch detection and syscall
> tables to ausyscall. Why are these syscall table conditional?

To reduce the number of text relocations in libaudit. Libaudit links against a 
number of applications and text relocations eats memory and increases startup 
time.


> 2) Is --with-armeb meant for ARMEB (aka ARM big-endian) or is it meant
> for ARM with embedded ABI? The help message of the configure says the
> later but it seems to be badly named.

I think its related to what comes out of uname -m.

-Steve