Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 27 Aug 2006 22:14:09 -0700 | From | Chris Wedgwood <> | Subject | Re: Why Semaphore Hardware-Dependent? |
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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). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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