3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
7:11 p.m.
On Mon, 3 Jun 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 06/03/2013 03:48 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Ahh, then why was it so important for Linux to specifically de-support
only the 80386?
When 486
and Pentium came out, they were treated as fast 386s, and
seemed to stay that way for a very long time.
Well, they are. The instruction set didn't change from the 80386 in
1985 until the Pentium-MMX in about 1996. From the discussions, it was just easier. i386 support
could have been
slowly moved off to a sub-arch, but it is /always/ far easier to
delete
lines of code than to re-engineer existing code. Hell, if the rt-linux
code can be merged into the mainline kernel (which Linus was originally
very much against), there is just no excuse for removing i386 support. I
seem to remember similar discussions re SMP and bigmem, too...