Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 8 Sep 2010 18:56:05 +0100 | From | Alan Cox <> | Subject | Re: AMD Geode NOPL emulation for kernel 2.6.36-rc2 |
| |
> If a process crashes because of NOPL usage, you get the feedback loop to fix it.
Trouble is that means rebuilding entire distributios, who don't neccessarily care about Geode. We had the same problem before with cmov and the VIA processors, GCC programmers didn't read the Intel PPro manual and got it wrong but it was the end users who suffered, and most of them were not in a position to rebuild their distro (and every security update, and test them all ...) and their distro didn't care.
So lots of people ran a kernel with a CMOV hack in it - never got mainstream which is unfortunate because if it had it would have helped a lot more people and had the hole in it fixed.
> The beauty of open source is that we can recompile to correct the bad > assumption; the latest version of binutils (GAS) finally corrects the > bad semantic that generic i686 includes NOPL.
And the reality is that this won't happen. Yes you can do it but it's an enormously slow and inefficient way to tackle the problem.
So the patch (corrected) makes complete sense.
Alan
| |