Message-ID: <4AF8864C.70101@zytor.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:14:52 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
CC: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>,
       Matteo Croce <technoboy85@gmail.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: i686 quirk for AMD Geode
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On 10/04/2009 07:58 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
>> I'm surprised that "i686" in debian depends on the family flag
>> in /proc/cpuinfo.. but hey.. weirder things have been done.
> 
> Its compensating for the old gcc bugs where gcc "i686" generated cmov
> instructions without any checks whether the CPU supported cmov (which is
> optional for a 686 architecture)
> 
> RPM has (or had) similar hacks. Both arguably come about from fundamental
> design thinkos in that they treat architecture as "special", not simply
> as a set of dependancies (needs x86, x86-cmov, glibc x86-32, ...) as
> should hve been done and which would also have made emulators just work
> out of the box instead of the current mess.
> 
> Alan

Well, for gcc, the string "i686" really means "pentiumpro".  All of
these are nothing but named feature sets.

	-hpa
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