Re: Pentium emulation

Russell Coker - mailing lists account (bofh@snoopy.virtual.net.au)
Fri, 25 Jul 97 22:26:36 +1100

>You have several PCs from 386 to Pentium (or Pentium II or whatever). You
>also have programs that should run on any of your PCs. This means you have
>to compile with the -m386 or -m486 option rather than optimizing for
>Pentium.
>Or you have a cool binary that has been compiled for Pentium but you want
>to try it on a 486...

>Couldn't the kernel provide emulation of the Pentium instructions for the
>386/486, to solve this problem? I guess it could be done since it would be
>very similar to the FPU emulator.

>So the question is mainly: Would it make sense?

No. Emulating a Pentium would make 386/486 CPUs extremely slow. If
you've got a mixture of CPUs then you're probably best off optimising for
486 (doesn't do any harm on a 386 and doesn't slow a Pentium down much) and
putting in 387 emulation for the machines that need it.

It works for me.

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