On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 21:34 +0200, Erik Mouw wrote: [...] > Also note that using assembly in drivers is a *very* bad idea cause it > makes the code non-portable. Until two years ago you could blissfully > ignore this and think "all the world is a 386", but with the number of > x86_64 machines growing every day this is no longer true. Face it, > Athlon64 machines are a reality. ACK. There are also laptos with them out there. And there is no reason to not buy and use them . Expecially since they are not much more expensive (if not cheaper) than comparable Intel stuff. And OpenOffice.org is ATM the last not 64bit clean widely used package AFAIK (ok, I'm not using KDE and only the parts GNOME which are necessary, but still ...). So basically you could run almost 64bit only systems with recent distributions. </commercial> > Right now there are exactly *four* drivers that have an assembly part, > but all those drivers are for hardware that's intimately tied to a > certain architecture. Unless the OP has such hardware, there's no > reason to write a (part of a) driver in assembly. Except you got a homework or similar thing to do. Bernd -- Firmix Software GmbH http://www.firmix.at/ mobil: +43 664 4416156 fax: +43 1 7890849-55 Embedded Linux Development and Services -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
