Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 11 Jun 1997 10:47:56 -0400 (EDT) | From | Michael Poole <> | Subject | Re: "obsolete" hardware |
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On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, yuri mironoff wrote: > > Forgive me if I didn't make myself clear. But let me say it another > way. If the choice is between spending the development time working on 386 > backward compatibility or taking advantage of some new feature of a P7 - > drop the 386 like a hot potato. >
Since I've seen that argument twice too often, I fell a need to speak out: The P7 will not be any reason to drop support for the 386. Rather, since it will be essentially a RISC chip with an onboard x86 emulator (according to the hype I remember reading from Intel and HP), and its native instruction set will be different than the x86 series, it will need a new tree in linux/arch/. Any new features or whatever can be implemented there; the current x86 code should continue to support the 386. As many people have said, the 386 code isn't broken, and dropping support for it won't really gain us anything.
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