3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
7:28 p.m.
On Mon, 3 Jun 2013, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Sun, 2 Jun 2013 11:21:58 -0500 (CDT)
Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote:
#ifdef preprocessor statements don't hurt performance at all. In fact,
done correctly, they don't even affect the compile time all that much.
The Linux kernel is still only as big as you
compile it. It can still
be built pretty small. The issue of dropping i386 is a different matter
-- some developers were "inconvenienced" by some of the old code, and
rather than redesign it so that they could handle some newer stuff
while still supporting the i386, they simply removed that code
entirely.
NetBSD had (or still has, I didn't check) the same problem. The problem
is that the i80386 lacks some functionality that all following i80x86
have. So the code is full of
if (i80386) {
...
} else {
...
}
or
#ifdef i80386
...
#else
...
#endif
This creatas a mess, makes the code less readable, is a constant source
of bugs and even hurts performance. The i80386 is ancient PeeCee shit.
I don't see any point in keeping this legacy. At least: One idea was to create a special i80386 port
of NetBSD that
supported the i80386 and only the i80386. Quite simple, given the
superbe multi platform support of NetBSD. But nobody found it woth the
work to keep that old i80386 shit alive.
Lazyness.