On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 13:54 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="O Plameras"> > > > Architecture wise, some changes from i386 to i586: > > But crucially, few of these things are interesting at the kernel level. Apps > can take advantage of CPU features like these regardless of the architecture > the kernel was built for. >
The only one that really needs kernel help is MMX/SSE stuff, but that works regardless of the architecture the kernel is built for, provided it's a recent enough kernel. As long as the kernel knows about MMX/SSE, it should do the right things with the registers even if built for '386' - it's only old kernels that don't know about MMX/SSE at all that will break. AIUI, apps that want to use those instructions should technically be checking /proc/cpuinfo for the appropriate flags in order to guarantee that the kernel won't make their data disappear, but in general it's safe anyway because everyone is running new kernels that support all the MMX/SSE features of the cpus. J. -- Jan Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] It all works, but it limits Linux processes to a mere 512GB of virtual address space. Such limits are irksome to the kernel developers when the hardware can do more, and, besides, somebody is likely to release a web browser or office suite which runs into that limit in the near future. - http://lwn.net/Articles/106177/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
