On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Oliver Xymoron wrote:
> > Not every i486 and i386 MP was weakly ordered.
> > Most weren't.
> > A few were.
> > Intel had no control over which was and which wasn't,
> > because everything was at the mercy of the system integrator.
>
> The ones that were weakly ordered probably didn't match the Intel MP boot
> spec either and are unlikely to ever be supported. Not because it's not
> doable, but since it's been 5+ years and no one's cared enough to do it
> yet.
You can choose strong spin_unlock conditionally when either CONFIG_M386
or CONFIG_M486 is defined. I think there is a possibility more and more
i486 MP systems will appear as their first-hand owners are getting rid of
them gradually. The second-hand owners may prefer to use Linux over
proprietary OSes these systems used before. I can't recall any failure
reports for i82489DX-based systems until last year, even though there used
to be a few quirks in the startup code preventing such systems from
booting till recently.
There may actually be weakly ordered Pentium MP systems, too. Correct me
if I'm wrong, but I believe there are no cache snooping signals in Pentium
60/66 CPUs and also triple/quad/etc. P54C systems cannot make use of these
signals as they only support dual configurations. So we may even have to
use strong spin_unlock for CONFIG_M586 or better let the user choose
either an integrated or a standalone APIC configuration -- it seems most
(all?) triple and larger P54C configurations used i82489DX APICs (probably
because the i82093AA I/O APIC was not available at that time, yet).
Given that i82489DXs (their bus protocol) were targeted to i486 and later
systems I would hardly believe there were MP-compliant i386 systems.
Unless they used discrete APIC implementations. ;-)
-- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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