Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:57:11 -0500 | From | Robert Dewar <> | Subject | Re: RELEASE BLOCKER: Linux doesn't follow x86/x86-64 ABI wrt direction flag |
| |
NightStrike wrote: > On 3/6/08, Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 05:12:07PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: >>> It's a kernel bug, and it needs to be fixed. >> I'm not convinced. It's been that way for 15 years, it's that way in >> the BSD kernels, at that point it's a feature. The bug is in the >> documentation, nowhere else. And in gcc for blindly trusting the >> documentation. > > The issue should not be evaluated as: "It's always been that way, > therefore, it's right." Instead, it should be: "What's the right way > to do it?" > > You don't just change documentation because no existing code meets the > requirement -- UNLESS -- the non-conforming code is actually the right > way to do things.
Sounds good, but has almost nothing to do with the real world. I remember back in Realia COBOL days, we had to carefully copy IBM bugs in the IBM mainframe COBOL compiler. Doing things right and fixing the bug would have been the right thing to do, but no one would have used Realia COBOL :-)
Another story, the sad story of the intel chip (I think it was the 80188) where Intel made use of Int 5, which was documented as reserved. Unfortunately, Microsoft/IBM had used this for print screen or some such. Intel was absolutely right that their documentation was clear and it was wrong to have used these interrupts .. but the result was a warehouse of unused chips.
| |