Re: [PATCH 0/6] i386 virtualization patches, Set 3

[David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com>]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Andi Kleen wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 03:58:09PM -0700, zach@vmware.com wrote:
> > I was going to attempt to clean up the math-emu code to make it use the
> > nice new segment and descriptor table accessors, but it quickly became
> > apparent that this would be a long, tedious, error prone process that
> > would eventually result in the death of a large section of my brain.
> > In addition, it is not very fun to test this on the actual hardware it
> > is designed to run on (although I did manage to track down a 386 with
> > detachable i387 coprocessor, the owner is not sure it still boots).
> > Someday it would be nice to have an audit of this code; it appears to
> > be riddled with bugs relating to segmentation, for example it assumes
> > LDT segments on overrides, does not use the mm->context semaphore to
> > protect LDT access, and generally looks scarily out of date in both
> > function and appearance.
>
> Perhaps the best would be to just remove it. Near all 386s should be far
> beyond their MTBF by now. Mark it CONFIG_BROKEN and if nobody complains for
> one or two releases remove it completely.

you are forgetting about the embedded market, there 386 cpu (or things 
that look like 386 cpu's) are still available.

David Lang

> The ugly verify_area 386 bugfix workaround code could go at the same
> time.
>
> -Andi
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