> And those machines are basically identical to perfectly regular i386 > platforms.
For modern (2001+) i386 platforms sure. The problem is the old and the weird. > > So the whole argument that it would "diverge" is total crap. It obviously > won't diverge, simply because the support for old setups is needed on > x86-64 *regardless* of whether 32-bit support exists on the same platform > or not. There is still some unneeded old platform code on x86-64 that will be removed (although I'm slowly discovering that some like the irq 0 hacks are still needed :/). i386 support goes much farther back than the earlier x86-64 code supported, not even talking about complications like the weird and fragile subarchs i386 has. And x86-64 since it supports only modern systems is easier to hack because it's much easier to regression test and only needs to care about reasonably modern hardware. That is for example it has new smpboot and i386 doesn't and has extended per CPU IRQ vectors and i386 doesn't and has new machine check code and i386 doesn't etc.etc. It was basically a new start in many areas. -Andi - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
