Re: [git pull] x86 fixes

Ingo Molnar
2008-09-08T19:03:18Z

* H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:

> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>>
>> the ideal case would be "support them all"
>
> Not really. That would include things like the i386, which is a bunch
> of really nasty stuff.

agreed - especially the verify_area() impact makes it a non-starter.

but 486 and higher is certainly quite reasonable, and is still being
tested.

... and _in practice_ 99% of all systems that run Linux today understand
CMOV.

... _and_ in practice 99% of all new Linux systems shipped today are
Core2 or better.

... and so on it goes with this argument. Everyone has a different
target audience and there's no firm limit. Maybe what makes more sense
is to have some sort of time dependency:

support all x86 CPUs released in the last year
support all x86 CPUs released in the past 5 years
support all x86 CPUs released in the past 10 years
support all x86 CPUs released ever
[ ... or configure a specific model ]

and people/distributions would use _those_ switches. That means we could
continuously tweak those targets, as systems become obsolete and new
CPUs arrive.

Ingo