nel 2.6.24 uscito a gennaio 2008 è stato unificato il codice x86_64 e i386
da KN
When support for the x86-64 AMD architecture was developed, it was decided to develop it as a "fork" of the traditional x86 architecture for comodity reasons. Many patches needed to patch a file in the i386 architecure directory, and another similar patch for the duplicated file in the x86_64 directory. It has been decided to unify both architectures in the same directory again.
This reunification has not been done in a radical way. In this release, both architectures have been unified in arch/x86, but only in appearance. All the source files in i386 and x86-64 directories have been moved to arch/x86, but renaming them with "_32" and "_64" suffixes. Ex: arch/i386/kernel/reboot.c has been moved to arch/x86/kernel/reboot_32.c, and arch/x86_64/kernel/reboot.c has been moved to arch/x86/kernel/reboot_64.c. Makefiles have been modified accordingly. So for now the reunification has been pretty much just a relocation of all the files and adaptation of the build machinery to make it compile just as it'd have been compiled in the old separated directories, done mostly with scripts.
In the future lots of those files will be unified and shared by both architectures, ex. reboot_32.c and reboot_64.c into reboot.c, and many files have already been unified in this release. Others will keep separated forever, due to the differences between both architectures.
Per l'unificazione dei singoli file le cose non sono ancora state completate, se guardate nei sorgenti i citati reboot_32 e reboot_64 ora sono un unico file, ma esistono ancora altri file separati