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    SubjectRe: Why Semaphore Hardware-Dependent?
    On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 10:18:35AM +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:

    > I believe the reason for not doing something like this on x86 was
    > the fact that we still support i386 processors, which don't have the
    > cmpxchg instruction. That's fair enough, but I would be opposed to
    > making semaphores bigger and slower on PowerPC because of that.
    > Hence the two different styles of implementation.

    The i386 is older than some of the kernel hackers, and given that a
    modern kernel is pretty painful with less than say 16MB or RAM in
    practice, I don't see that it would be all that terrible to drop
    support for ancient CPUs at some point (yes, I know some newer
    embedded (and similar) CPUs might be affected here too, but surely not
    that many that people really use --- and they could just use 2.4.x).
    -
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