[M3devel] 386?486?586?686?etc.?

[Tony Hosking]

We probably should provide pthread-mutex-based atomics for targets that don't support the intrinsic atomics.  Initially, I suggest we simply provide stubs that fail for the gcc-intrinsic functions.  Thoughts?

I doubt there are any older-than-Pentium processors that we need to worry about.

On 7 Feb 2010, at 18:59, Jay K wrote:

> Any opinions/counter-opinions on which processors we should support?
> Presumably it doesn't vary per platform.
>  Like, it wouldn't be Linux/586 and FreeBSD/486 or such.
>   Unless maybe there is clear data about what the kernels support?
>  
>  
> The atomic stuff is pushing things to i586.
> I believe before 486 and possibly 386 worked.
> 686 is probably reasonable.
> I think it is Pentium II or Pentium Pro or newer, stuff like 15 years old already.
>  
>  
> We might even drop "x87" support and use SSE/SSE2/SSE3?
>  (Trolling for work in m3back? :) )
>  Or make it a different set of platforms?
>    I686_LINUX?
>    I686SSE2_LINUX?
>    etc.?
>  
>  
> But I don't like such combinatorial work -- supporting more combinations.
> Maybe, uh, drop all existing 32bit platforms and go with I686_*??
>  
>  
> "Darwin" can pretty much imply modern processors.
>   Assuming Apple hardware...granted, I had Darwin/x86 on non-Apple hardware.
>  
> None of this makes a huge difference.
> I mean, in that, there's almost no changes that follow from these decisions.
>  
>  
>  - Jay
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://m3lists.elegosoft.com/pipermail/m3devel/attachments/20100207/b056954f/attachment-0002.html>