Re: Is 386 processor still supported?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 01:06:55 +0000, Maciej W. Rozycki <macro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>  Myself, I could not resist trying an APIC-based 486 SMP box and possibly 
> fixing issues if I found one and it was MPS-compliant, but nothing beyond 
> that I would say.  Life's too short.

While it is not SMP, I still have one or two working i386 (and
a compatible AMD) system around.

Back in the days where I ran them the last time, there were two
issues:

  * Debian's baseline libc is compiled to use LOCK and some other
    newish instructions that are not available on a real i386 CPU.
  * There was a patch flying around to introduce a kernel-based
    emulator for those instructions. However, this was (at that time)
    neither included in Debian's kernel, nor in the upstream sources.

MfG, JBG

-- 
      Jan-Benedict Glaw      jbglaw@xxxxxxxxxx              +49-172-7608481
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