Re: your mail

Dave Jones
2003-09-30T15:11:48Z

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 03:58:54PM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:

> (Aside: It is quite an anomaly that those cumbersome floating point
> instructions are emulated on the older CPUs, yet all the other
> instructions aren't emulated. Emulation is very slow, and forcing
> userspace to just use different code instead is good, but that's just
> as valid for floating point as it is for MMX, cmpxchg etc.)

There was a patch around a while back that did 486 emulation on 386
kernels. I think it even made into the Mandrake kernel.

> To be fair, the kernel really ought to just say that and halt. That
> is a fine compromise. It won't make embedded systems folks completely
> happy, because if you've only got 2MB of NVRAM for your whole kernel
> _and_ filesystem including user data (think PDA or cellphone), then a
> hundred bytes here or there is actually worth trimming.

With such tight constraints, why not just use 2.4 (or even 2.2) which
has much lower memory usage and diskspace requirements ?

Dave

--
Dave Jones http://www.codemonkey.org.uk