On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 11:06:21PM -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:
The only thing 486 might give is the ability to consign the old linuxthread stuff to the dustbin of back compatibility.
I'm guessing that's supposed to be a joke?
No its quite serious. 486 adds a lot of the SMP instructions like XADD that good threading in user space wants.
True. However they could be emulated inefficiently on 386. I remember seeing a patch (I think from Andi Kleen) that added 386 suport to NPTL.