linux-kernel - Re: [git pull] x86 fixes

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Date:	Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:25:41 -0400
From:	Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	x86 maintainers <x86@...nel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [git pull] x86 fixes

On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:02:49 +0200, Ingo Molnar said:

> ... 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.

That's just *asking* for flame mail if somebody builds a kernel for a system
that's 4 year 9 months old, and he builds a kernel 6 months later, and it fails
to boot because the CPU is now 3 months out and we've deprecated it...

Quick - what year/month was the CPU you're using now released?  No peeking. ;)

(For the record, I have no *clue* when Intel actually released the Core2 T7200,
which is a whole *nother* can of worms - the chip release date can be quite
some time before the system vendor ships, and when the consumer actually buys
it - it's quite possible that we can write "released in the past 5 years",
a user looks at it and says "I bought this system 4 years 2 months ago", and
think he's OK, but he's not because he bought a system released 4 years 9 months
ago that used a chipset released 5 years 6 months ago...

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