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Date:      Thu, 1 Apr 2004 15:11:38 +1000 (EST)
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        John Baldwin <john@baldwin.cx>
Cc:        Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?q?Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
Subject:   Re: CFD: XMLification of NOTES
Message-ID:  <20040401145536.A5418@gamplex.bde.org>
In-Reply-To: <200403311105.19088.john@baldwin.cx>
References:  <20040328094048.GA40406@phantom.cris.net> <20040330232429.GA65170@phantom.cris.net> <xzpn05xq4bh.fsf@dwp.des.no> <200403311105.19088.john@baldwin.cx>

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On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, John Baldwin wrote:

> On Tuesday 30 March 2004 06:54 pm, Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav wrote:
> > CPU_I386 should not conflict with SMP, but a kernel build with both
> > will be very slow.
>
> No, it does conflict.  There's no cmpxchg on i386 and no one has had the
> desire or time to emulate one for 386 machines.  Doing so would be a wast=
e in
> my opinion as well.

des only claimed that it "should not".

Emulating cmpxchg might make a kernel built with both slow, but the
current CPU_I386 only adds a tiny amount of slowness.  It just doesn't
work on multi-CPU systems if multiple CPUs are actually used.

Does it actually conflict in practice (except for the forced #error)
if the hardware is UP?  jhb's APIC changes made configuring with SMP
not require APIC, so SMP kernels work on UP systems.  Configuring with
I386_CPU shouldn't affect this, but it does because of the forced #error
at compile time.

Bruce



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