Re: your mail

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 03:58:54PM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:

 > (Aside: It is quite an anomaly that those cumbersome floating point
 > instructions are emulated on the older CPUs, yet all the other
 > instructions aren't emulated.  Emulation is very slow, and forcing
 > userspace to just use different code instead is good, but that's just
 > as valid for floating point as it is for MMX, cmpxchg etc.)

There was a patch around a while back that did 486 emulation on 386
kernels. I think it even made into the Mandrake kernel.

 > To be fair, the kernel really ought to just say that and halt.  That
 > is a fine compromise.  It won't make embedded systems folks completely
 > happy, because if you've only got 2MB of NVRAM for your whole kernel
 > _and_ filesystem including user data (think PDA or cellphone), then a
 > hundred bytes here or there is actually worth trimming.

With such tight constraints, why not just use 2.4 (or even 2.2) which
has much lower memory usage and diskspace requirements ?

		Dave

-- 
 Dave Jones     http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
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