Re: Why Semaphore Hardware-Dependent?

Jan Engelhardt
2006-08-28T06:00:24Z

>
>The i386 is older than some of the kernel hackers, and given that a
>modern kernel is pretty painful with less than say 16MB or RAM in
>practice

I have to concur. (Sure, you can't get a reasonable system to work on 16MB,
but the kernel is fine with 5 megs of RAM. In fact, ancient i386 boxes
usually do not have "big" things like SCSI, USB or Audio.)

>, I don't see that it would be all that terrible to drop
>support for ancient CPUs at some point (yes, I know some newer
>embedded (and similar) CPUs might be affected here too, but surely not
>that many that people really use --- and they could just use 2.4.x).

Jan Engelhardt
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