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SubjectRe: Is 386 processor still supported?
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:

> * Debian's baseline libc is compiled to use LOCK and some other
> newish instructions that are not available on a real i386 CPU.

LOCK dates back to the 8086 -- it has to work with the i386. What is not
supported are the following i486 additions: CMPXCHG (amusingly enough
early i486 steppings used a different opcode for this one; no idea if it
is still possible to find such a CPU), XADD and BSWAP, the latter being
fairly unimportant.

> * There was a patch flying around to introduce a kernel-based
> emulator for those instructions. However, this was (at that time)
> neither included in Debian's kernel, nor in the upstream sources.

UP emulation of CMPXCHG and XADD for userland should be rather trivial,
so why not include it like with LL/SC for MIPS?

Maciej


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