On 17-Jan-01 Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Robert Drehmel writes:
>>In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, John Baldwin wrote:
>>> Early Pentiums (<= P90) don't support CX8 or so I've heard, which make this
>>> slightly more complicated, as for a pentium we would have to use a function
>>> pointer that we setup during probe. Also, during a SMP boot we would have
>>> to
>>> panic if CX8 wasn't enabled on all CPU's.
>>
>>P75 (stepping 5): <FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8>
>>
>>cmpxchg8 was actually introduced with the Pentium processors,
>>as Mr. Wollman already wrote.
>
> Either way, it's precense should be determined by looking at the CPUID
> feature bit. It's the only reliable way.
It's expensive though. Ok, after some digging I found out what this particular
person was referring to: on Pentiums with stepping < 0xc, a cmpxchg8b that
crosses a page boundary triggers an illegel opcode fault rather than a page
fault if the second page is missing. Woo. :) So as long as we keep all
atomically-accessed 64-bit integers within a single page we should be fine for
CX8 on all pentiums should we even want 64-bit atomic ops.
--
John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/
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