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From: | ness |
Subject: | Re: Processor requirements |
Date: | Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:37:25 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (X11/20051031) |
ness wrote:
Here is my position:For the beginning, it is OK to only support i686+. Running coyotos in qemu is a need. But i think, at least in future, coyotos should run on early hardware. This hasn't to be absolutely efficient. Who wants a high speed system will not try old hardware. But there are people (like me) that don't have much money (I'm working on a 600€ box here, and it's the best I ever had. I'm not going to experiment with it. I got a really old box for doing so. btw, I bought new mouse, too, but my monitors and non-primary graphic cards are 10+ years old.).
I missed sth. here. What I actually wanted to say is that that coyotos wouldn't've run on the box I had a year ago.
And often old hardware is still sufficient for simple jobs, like a local dhcp server.Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:I'm currently settling the cross-build tools for Coyotos, and I'ld like some input on something. In EROS, I decided early *not* to support the i386. EROS required i486 or better. This is because the i386 does not honor the write-protect bit in supervisor mode, and we need this for efficiency in the IPC implementation. Given that it is now 2005, does anybody see a need today to support processors earlier than i686 in desktop PCs? The specific features I am looking for are the "page size extensions" (4M pages) and the per-page global bit. I *think* that both of these were actually present in the appendix H extensions for the Pentium, but I'm not certain about PSE. I have appendix H in a box somewhere, but I'm damned if I can locate it at the moment. I am aware that embedded processors like Geode don't all do PSE. We need to support those, but the question I'm trying to ask right now has to do with the minimum level of PC motherboard that the Hurd group wants to support. shap
-- -ness-
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