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Message-ID: <20080908190249.GA21998@elte.hu>
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2008 21:02:49 +0200
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
Cc: 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
* H. Peter Anvin <hpa@...or.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
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