On Saturday 28 April 2007 09:52:30 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Next time I'm in a really tormenting mood I will fire up my
> > my ibm ps2 with it's 16Mhz 386 and 6MB and verify that all is working
> > well there.
> >
>
> Well, that would be interesting. From a subarch perspective, it would
> just be the normal default, and in theory it should work fine. But I
> suspect the fpu emulator is probably broken, and non-WP is likely to
> have rotted,
AFAIK it's been tested occasionally on some embedded 386 systems
(e.g. by Thomas Gleixner). Probably not with the recent changes though.
> and lots of other things. Is that an MCA machine?
Yes should be.
> > I really don't think it is ok to be cavalier about anything
> > that we actually support. Usually if we can handle the general
> > case it makes for better more maintainable code.
> >
> > So far the paravirt class of machines seems every bit as much a subarch
> > as voyager and every bit as interesting.
> >
> Well, not really. The problem with the subarch mechanism is that it
> promotes a lot of copied code with small modifications, and so making
> changes is the inherently non-general activity of trying to find all the
> various copies, work out what subtle differences they have, and try to
> make the appropriate changes in each case. This was one of the major
> objections to the original Xen-as-subarch patches, and it is the problem
> with Voyager. The mass of preprocessor tricks doesn't help either.
Yes I agree. Current i386 subarch is a mess and I hope to slowly phase
it out. mach-{es7000,summit} should just be folded into mach-generic
always (like x86-64) and I'm somewhat hoping that mach-voyager and
perhaps mach-visws too will just go away at some point.
The future direction are focussed pluggable interfaces like genapic, smp_ops etc.
-Andi
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