Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 31 Dec 1998 12:31:37 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: 2.2.0pre1 OOPS on boot. |
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On Thu, 31 Dec 1998, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > I agree with removing completly the i386 i486 i586 i686 and add instead > the "has RDTSC", "has not buggy IOAPIC", "has working wp in supervisor > mode MMU" etc... config option. I think it's more generic, will not cause > documentation mistakes anymore and will produce more readable code. The > mtrr stuff just follow this good way.
Note that I have rewritten the config.in file to essentially do this, and now the i386/etc choices are really just shorthands for various combinations of options.
I agree that the most flexible thing is to make each option an option in itself, but quite frankly, it's way too confusing to people that don't intimately know their machine. Think of somebody that knows he has a Celeron chip, but doesn't know much else. At least there is a chance in hell that he would select "Pentium Pro", but there is just _no_ way that he can sanely answer a few questions like
- do you hav a working WP bit in supervisor mode? - do you have a time stamp counter that works? - does you machine have a local APIC that doesn't need the read-before-write workaround?
And that's basically why there is the choice according to machine type rather than according to each possible feature.
Linus
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