On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 06:05, Colin Watson wrote: > I disagree. Unlike 286, we've got the kernel, the libc, and *almost* > everything else. The only thing missing is part of the C++ ABI, which as > described can be handled by a small kernel patch (at least this has been > claimed and nobody has immediately said "it's impossible" ...).
The problem isn't just the C++ ABI; it's any application that uses an insn like cmpxchg. Basically any application that wants to have atomic integers or similar will be using this insn. Of software I'm familiar with, this includes gstreamer and dbus right now. And glib will soon have atomic integers too (for refcounting). I'm surprised that pthreads apparently doesn't use it. > I don't think this one lack puts it straight into the 286 camp just yet. Maybe. > The problem is that we really don't have sensible support for > subarchitectures at all. Yes, I agree, that is by far the biggest bug. > [...] 386 people would be quite entitled to look at > all this mess and say "well, why don't you just leave everything as it > is and let us make this small kernel change, until we can standardize on > gcc-3.3 with a fixed ABI"? Note that the current situation is that we don't run on i386, unless they emulate opcodes. In which case, we really can still say we don't run on i386.
