Re: PATCH: (on Alpha) emulating missing instructions

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Sat, 16 Oct 1999 14:41:58 +0100 (BST)


> Although I agree with Alan entirely for open-source code, we still have a
> problem with binary-only products (such as Civilisation CTP). In such
> situations emulation can be very useful (even if it's non-optimal).

Your vendor made a mistake. They shipped the wrong binary. They picked
wrong compile options - but its a beta thats why you put betas out - to
find bugs.

> Please let's not consider emulating in user land .. emulating in the kernel
> is slow enough! ;)

This may be true for the Alpha cases because unlike FPU you probably don't
get clusters of byte operations.

> BTW, for our alpha emulation patch, we were concerned about speed and not
> security (woops) .. soon we'll post another patch to fix the security.

Which is a text book reason for putting emulation in user space.

Alan

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