Re: 80386 support in -current

On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 05:28:31PM +1100, Bruce Evans wrote:
>SMP is now in GENERIC, so support for it is more important than when
>I386_CPU was removed from GENERIC.
>
>The ifdef tangle for this stuff combined with lack of testing seems to
>have broken the 386 support in practice.

Interesting.  Does anyone on this list actually use -CURRENT on a 386?
Unfortunately(?) my 386 laptop died terminally some years ago (the HDD
died and the BIOS only supports 80MB and 120MB HDDs) and my 386
motherboard collection got trashed last year as part of a move.

>  Libraries are now chummy with
>the kernel implementation of atomic operations, but not chummy enough to
>know when it actually works in userland.  libthr uses the kernel
>atomic_cmpset_*(), but this never works on plain i386's in userland
>(the I386_CPU version doesn't work unless the application gains i/o
>privilege since it uses cli/sti, and the !I386_CPU version doesn't
>work because it uses cmpxchg).

Is it time to bite the bullet and fully desupport the 80386?  It looks
like threads don't work and it's likely that other bitrot will set in
in the absence of active testing.  

Peter