Re: i387/FPU init issues...

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Sat May 03 2008 - 16:07:34 EST


Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
On Sat, 3 May 2008, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Intel explicitly documents "all processors with family 6 or F."

It depends (as usually with Intel) on what document you are looking at. Based on my short research, the instruction has been retroactively added
to the list of supported opcodes. Even my somewhat dated P4 manual does
not list it, never mind its predecessors. It could have been accidentally
omitted or even buggy in some early members of the P6 family and this
could have been the reason for not documenting it from the beginning (the
case of FFREEP comes to mind).


It has retroactively been added to the documented list for all P6 core chips - that should mean it works on all of them. The most common reason for not documenting something (other than various Pure Evil NDA schemes) is that it hasn't been properly verified. However, verification can be done a posteori.

-hpa
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/