2005/10/30, Uriel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 03:02:34PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Seems to me the concensus on this list is that we > > should keep the support so that Plan 9 will continue > > to run on all the broken non-Intel hardware clones > > and emulators. > Do really those emulators and clones require 386 support? From this > thread my conclusion was that it is not an issue.
They don't. FreeBSD without 386 support runs in VMWare and qemu. Bochs is dying as far as I can tell. I feel that removing support for 386 is fine, and my understanding after reading this thread is that we're worried about embedded platforms, and it seems that most of these that we run on are already 486 or higher. With regard to the instruction set clones, I've run post-386-debacle FreeBSD (and seen it run) on several clone boards including the Via embedded stuff and Geode stuff. My understanding of how this got into the embedded chipset stuff was that a suggestion was made to deprecate 486 as well, which I don't think we should do at all. Get rid of 386, support 486+. > I seriously doubt requiring Pentium would be a problem for most > emulators or recent embedded hardware. It is a big problem for recent embedded hardware. Until the pentium-based embedded boards get cheaper, it's still nice to have cheap-ish 486 boards, and these will _not_ go anywhere for a while, especially since their price will fall more if the pentium boards get cheaper. > Hell, qemu(the only emulator that matters this days as far as Plan 9 is > concerned) can even emulate x86_64: > > http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/status.html > > uriel --Devon
