Re: Dropping M386 support in 2.6.15
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 09:16:34PM +0100, Frederik Schueler wrote:
> due to upstream changes in 2.6.15-rc series, the current i386 386 flavour
> does not build anymore with plain old M386 support activated.
>
> Deactivating those drivers - which need those instructions not available on
> M386 - is not an option, because for example ACPI and DRI do need CMPXCHG:
> deactivating those would render the 386 flavour useless on most non-M386
> hardware, and as a generic flavour for non-k7 and non-686 CPUs.
Is the CMPXCHG required to detect that the system doesn't have ACPI and
DRI? If not it ought to still be possible to use a kernel on i386 and
have support for those features, unless the compiler won't allow that.
> We dropped the security-buggy x86-i486_emu patch providing software
> emulation of CMPXCHG and other instructions with the 2.6.12-1 release of
> linux-2.6, so M386 support was broken anyway in all post-sarge kernel
> images.
Yeah I remember seeing things about libc requireing it and such.
Personally I don't have anything lower than a 486, so what do I care,
other than I love keeping old hardware useful. :)
> For a related discussion before Sarge got released, see [1].
>
> To document this change, the 386 flavour has been renamed to 486 in
> SVN, and the config has been adapted to M486.
> 2.6.15-rc5 will be uploaded to experimental soon, containing this change.
>
> when 2.6.15 hits unstable, all concerned packages from the debian-installer
> should cope with this change apropriately.
Len Sorensen
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