Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:24:50 -0400 | From | Dave Jones <> | Subject | Re: 2.6.26-rc6-git2: Reported regressions from 2.6.25 |
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On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 12:31:52AM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > On Sat, 14 Jun 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > From what you have written it looks the dependency should actually be: > > > > > > depends on !M386 && !M486 && !M586 && !M586TSC && !M586MMX > > > > > > as none of the pre-Pentium-Pro processors had the PAE feature (I am not > > > sure about non-Intel implementations, so the case of M586 would have to be > > > investigated). > > > > Yes, it's the non-intel ones that would keep me from saying !M586. > > > > For intel, PAE was a PPro feature (at least officially, as you point out), > > but I do not know about various other manufacturers. From personal > > experience, the line between Pentium and PPro features doesn't tend to be > > totally black-and-white (although I suspect that when it comes to PAE it > > _may_ be). > > Well, PAE is quite a significant block to implement and Intel kept it > hidden until they published the long awaited PentiumPro manual sometime in > 1996. I am fairly sure the K5 did not implement it (it may have had PSE > and VME, especially in the later revisions) and Google does not show up > any Cyrix processors with PAE. I may have a K5 manual somewhere, so I can > see if I can verify it.
Even the K6 didn't have PAE. The Athlon was AMD's first CPU that had it.
> Please also note these processors tried to compete with Intel on the > desktop market where 4GB of RAM was completely unreasonable in late 90s. > I think unless someone can recall a counter-example, it can be safely > assumed these chips did not have the PAE. We could try to extend the > dependency and see if anybody screams.
I agree. To the best of my knowledge (and looking through output of x86info from lots of old CPUs), Intel had the only CPUs with PAE in that era.
Dave
-- http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
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