Re: x86 status was Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 15:58 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Chris Wright wrote:
> > 
> > That's not quite right.  Leaving the code unchanged caused breakage
> > already.  The PIT is damn stupid and can be sensitive to how quickly it's
> > programmed.  So code that enable/disable didn't change, but frequency
> > with which it is called did and broke some random boxes.
> 
> Sure. We cannot avoid *all* problems. Bugs happen. 
> 
> But at least we could try to make sure that there aren't totally 
> unnecessary changes in that switch-over patch. Which there definitely 
> were, as far as I can tell.


one note is that the "talk differently to hardware" thing is in part
already tested with the 32 bit tickless code; a lot of people (80% ?)
are still using the 32 bit OS on their 64 bit machines, and the 32 bit
code already talks in the "new way" to this hardware.... 
(and since Fedora 7 already ships tickless for 32 bit there are quite a
lot of people using that in practice, in addition to the kernel.org
kernel users)

I would expect just about all the hardware interaction issues to have
popped up already because of this "run 32 bit on 64 bit hardware" thing.
-- 
if you want to mail me at work (you don't), use arjan (at) linux.intel.com
Test the interaction between Linux and your BIOS via http://www.linuxfirmwarekit.org

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