Re: My thoughts on the "new development model"

William Lee Irwin III
2004-10-29T17:53:39Z

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> users with anything but the crappiest x86 s**tboxen and a tiny subset
>> of all drivers (arjan's 20) are hopelessly outnumbered.

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 09:19:39AM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Sorry, i386 is really a pool of Pentium, Athlon, and Opteron chips, with
> a witches brew of HT, 64bit extensions to 32 bit chips, and the like.
> Connected by a constantly changing set of Intel, SiS, VIA and other
> shipsets, and getting storage from IDE and SATA drives.
> Not to mention using a vast array of CD and DVD drives and several major
> flavors of USB methods with minor variations of each, and driving their
> consoles with at least a half-dozen popular video chipsets with drivers
> of various shades of openness.
> You don't even reach 99.99% with small-endian, there are more assorted
> RISC chips in use than that. I guess you're safe with twos complement
> arithmetic, although I cringed at Linus' recent "find a power of two"
> code which depends on it. Diversity, thy name is Linux!

Feel free to compile real statistics on in-the-field Linux code use.
I'll go with my handwavy assessment until I see such.

-- wli