RE: dropping CONFIG_IA32_SUPPORT from ia64

Luck, Tony
2006-05-26T18:25:21Z

> Just for clarity, what platforms would be affected by this? I thought
> the non-free software was needed for Montecito+, and that Madison
> worked fine w/o it.

You are correct. All cpu implementations prior to "Montecito" have
h/w support for x86 instructions. "Montecito" does not. You'll
have to make your own bets and guesses about whether this would ever
be re-introduced.

> My vote is not to drop the "free" kernel support, though I'm also not
> offering to take over maintenance so it probably doesn't count for
> much.

"Freeze" is pretty much where it has been for a while. This thread was
started by a patch that caught up all the missing x86 system calls. Even
though the handlers all point into generic code, I'm always a bit twitchy
about including code that hasn't been exercised even once. This would be
a lot easier if people adding system calls provided at least an example
program that uses the call ... even better would be an actual test-suite
that runs through all the options and failure cases for the call. But
the recent slew of new syscalls have mostly lacked any such trimmings.

-Tony