From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S935878AbXGLCx5 (ORCPT ); Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:53:57 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1757431AbXGLCxt (ORCPT ); Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:53:49 -0400 Received: from pentafluge.infradead.org ([213.146.154.40]:37045 "EHLO pentafluge.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759667AbXGLCxs (ORCPT ); Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:53:48 -0400 Subject: Re: x86 status was Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23 From: Arjan van de Ven To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Chris Wright , Thomas Gleixner , Ingo Molnar , Andi Kleen , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: References: <20070710013152.ef2cd200.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070711174252.GA16793@elte.hu> <1184191488.12353.160.camel@chaos> <20070711225139.GB4306@sequoia.sous-sol.org> Content-Type: text/plain Organization: Intel International BV Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:53:19 +0800 Message-Id: <1184208799.2693.15.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.10.3 (2.10.3-1.fc7) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by pentafluge.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 15:58 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Chris Wright wrote: > > > > That's not quite right. Leaving the code unchanged caused breakage > > already. The PIT is damn stupid and can be sensitive to how quickly it's > > programmed. So code that enable/disable didn't change, but frequency > > with which it is called did and broke some random boxes. > > Sure. We cannot avoid *all* problems. Bugs happen. > > But at least we could try to make sure that there aren't totally > unnecessary changes in that switch-over patch. Which there definitely > were, as far as I can tell. one note is that the "talk differently to hardware" thing is in part already tested with the 32 bit tickless code; a lot of people (80% ?) are still using the 32 bit OS on their 64 bit machines, and the 32 bit code already talks in the "new way" to this hardware.... (and since Fedora 7 already ships tickless for 32 bit there are quite a lot of people using that in practice, in addition to the kernel.org kernel users) I would expect just about all the hardware interaction issues to have popped up already because of this "run 32 bit on 64 bit hardware" thing. -- if you want to mail me at work (you don't), use arjan (at) linux.intel.com Test the interaction between Linux and your BIOS via http://www.linuxfirmwarekit.org