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Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 11:58:27 +0000 (GMT)
From: Tigran Aivazian <tigran@veritas.com>
To: Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>
cc: Jordan <ledzep37@home.com>, Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Error in x86 CPU capabilities starting with test5/6
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On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, Mikael Pettersson wrote:
> You have a user-space program which parses /proc/cpuinfo instead of
> executing CPUID itself, so it breaks.

Hi Mikael,

Arguably, it is always better to parse /proc/cpuinfo instead of executing
CPUID directly (think PCI -- drivers should _NOT_ get their irq/io/etc
values from config space directly but only what the kernel puts on a plate
for them in the struct pci_dev).

So, one could imagine the kernel which emulates in software some of the
processor features and then CPUID would lie but /proc/cpuinfo would tell
the truth.

Also, Linux is very stable wrt to application interfaces (I compare Linux
with Linux and not Linux with "non-Linux", cf 1Cor 2:13) so one can safely
rely on the exported data formats to stay always the same (to a reasonable
extent).

Regards,
Tigran

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