From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 15:07:45 -0400 From: William Josephson To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] 386 Message-ID: <20051029190745.GE38291@mero.morphisms.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Topicbox-Message-UUID: a1092a02-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 11:08:18AM -0400, Russ Cox wrote: > Is anyone out there using Plan 9 on 386 machines? > I'm just wondering whether it's going to affect anyone > if the default kernels assume they can use some of > the 486 instructions (specifically INVLPG). I am not and for some things I'm working on, I've given up and assumed a PentiumPro. That said, it would be nice to retain support for older machines. It has been a while since I've looked at Plan 9's VM system. How hard would it be to select an implementation at run time? It isn't too hard to probe for these sorts of things at boot. I suppose one could also make it a compile-time option, but I'd be inclined to avoid that since it could lead to a real mess if people decided that they wanted to use other features down the road. Why the sudden interest in invlpg?