Michael McConville [mmcco...@sccs.swarthmore.edu] wrote: > > Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the days of i386 > images being reasonable to run on amd64 hardware are coming to an end. > i386 support appears to be a fading priority for most projects and the > subset of amd64 features used is growing quickly.
The N^X feature on OpenBSD/i386 can now provide better fine-grained control if PAE available. This is new to OpenBSD 5.8. Before PAE was activated, i386 used segments to provide an N^X feature. So, they are now at parity with N^X. I've never even ran across one of these very early 64-bit Intel chips without N^X (those are the primary ones that you'd want to run i386 on). Even my oldest 64-bit Pentium 4 chips claim NX support. The story goes that Intel didn't want to copy AMD's NX support but implement it differently. Microsoft told Intel they would only support one implementation and AMD's was it.
