Re: Sarge, kernel-image, and i586-SMP
Steaphan Greene wrote:
>I would not mind it being slow. However, since there seems to be
>absolutely no SMP support for 586 OR BELOW, I must roll my own or
>ignore one of my processors. That's what bothers me. Even a 386-smp
>kernel would be fine by me. I just would like to be able to
In case anyone tries this, Debian *really* has no support for SMP on
386; one of the kernel patches which is specfically required for
real-i386 is not multi-processor-safe.
(Long story. The patch emulates 486 instructions, one of which is an
atomic instruction, but does not do so atomically on multi-processor
machines. The patch is required to support i486+-based atomicity.h,
which is part of the binary compatibility standard for C++ used by all
other Linux distributions, without breaking C++ binary compatibility
between i386 and i486 on Debian. We can't comfortably break either type
of binary compatibility.)
There's no real reason I can see not to build a 486-smp kernel. There
actually are some pretty good arguments for a 586 kernel, because 586
instruction scheduling is wildly different from both 486 and 686 (which
are fairly similar to each other).
Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>There were SMP systems based on i386 CPUs from Sequent, and 486-based
>SMP systems both based on the Intel MP spec were aviable from various
>vendors, aswell as stranger designs like the NCR Voyager (also
>supported by Linux)
Well, Debian sarge can't support those Sequent systems, but the 486
systems could be supported.
Reply to: