-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 31 Oct 2006, at 3:07 am, Ron Johnson wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 10/30/06 14:43, Bill Allombert wrote:On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 01:04:28PM +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:[snip]Because we never had ? We have dropped support for i386, but only a fraction of i386 had a MMU and so were able to run Linux, and this change was forced upon us by the rest of the world.???? I'm very sure that all 386 chips had MMU. You might have been thinking of the 386SX, which did not have an FPU. However, it could easily (but *slowly*) run Linux when "enable software FP" was enabled in the kernel.
Er, none of the 386 chips had an FPU. IIRC, the difference between a 386DX and a 386SX was the interface to the rest of the machine; the 386SX has interface circuitry similar to a 286, so that hardware manufacturers didn't need to design a completely new board for a 386 machine, but could adapt their existing (cheap) 286 designs instead.
The 486 was the first CPU in the X86 family to have an integral FPU. Tim -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin) iQEVAwUBRUt0cRypeFo2odvPAQKsqwf+PTs+x9GWR8aaXOavoMn+Zvsb89tAPZ3z Myr4xdRPhNZ3R/9QIYi12T+l5vjFfzWEbJtpvrFinYa+K5HAB3G7xUm/mZYSMfEF MvJlR5COmPGyjNg/euomYteDSXdLoj06xbav9hLXB51WpT84jdQBEn0CjgRUuBV+ OUB82136en1PKHY7oJbQXdwHoEThsOdkeop94slQhR+G1BwLtCQU9FBewC1i3L6n tNJvzT6b3iuRdYckUtHTWb5fiEORK0DXVqAM1wzlUZiSX2xqJQowFvfQ4jNiMEnn JYXw9EXUzIKy81eHwh4M0ajHAZptWt39Hd8uzdXr3lklBNtuK61/qg== =740J -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----