Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 17 Jan 2004 03:57:45 +0100 | From | Adrian Bunk <> | Subject | Re: [1/4] better i386 CPU selection |
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On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 04:01:33PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: >... > I must say that I'm a bit wobbly about Adrian's recent patches, simply > because of the overall intrusiveness and conceptual changes which they > introduce.
The only patch where I'd say this really applies to is better-i386-cpu-selection.patch .
I'm really happy that you added it in the latest -mm and I'm even more happy that I haven't yet heard of any major breakage it has caused.
But it's your decision whether you like this patch or prefer to drop it.
> Remind me again, what did they buy us?
The main effect is that better-i386-cpu-selection.patch makes it easier for people who configure kernels that should work on different CPU types. A user (= person compiling his own kernel) does no longer need any deeper knowledge when e.g. configuring a kernel that should run on both an Athlon and a Pentium 4 - he simply selects all CPUs he wants to support in his kernel.
As a side effect, this patch allows further optimizations based on the fact that e.g. a kernel for an i386 no longer needs to support an Athlon which can be used to omit support for non-selected CPUs [1].
cu Adrian
[1] e.g. there's no need to include arch/i386/kernel/cpu/amd.c in your kernel if the kernel should only run on a 386; I made two such example patches that are _way_ too ugly for merging but show that this CPU selection scheme makes some more space savings possible
--
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