From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755536AbYIHU0T (ORCPT ); Mon, 8 Sep 2008 16:26:19 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753698AbYIHU0H (ORCPT ); Mon, 8 Sep 2008 16:26:07 -0400 Received: from turing-police.cc.vt.edu ([128.173.14.107]:34364 "EHLO turing-police.cc.vt.edu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753543AbYIHU0G (ORCPT ); Mon, 8 Sep 2008 16:26:06 -0400 X-Mailer: exmh version 2.7.2 01/07/2005 with nmh-1.2 To: Ingo Molnar Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" , Arjan van de Ven , Linus Torvalds , x86 maintainers , Andrew Morton , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: [git pull] x86 fixes In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:02:49 +0200." <20080908190249.GA21998@elte.hu> From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu References: <200809081752.m88Hq6tn005080@askone.hos.anvin.org> <48C56D60.7010405@zytor.com> <20080908114619.741b6786@infradead.org> <48C57439.3040903@zytor.com> <20080908190249.GA21998@elte.hu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="==_Exmh_1220905541_3062P"; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:25:41 -0400 Message-ID: <38118.1220905541@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org --==_Exmh_1220905541_3062P Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:02:49 +0200, Ingo Molnar said: > ... and so on it goes with this argument. Everyone has a different > target audience and there's no firm limit. Maybe what makes more sense > is to have some sort of time dependency: > > support all x86 CPUs released in the last year > support all x86 CPUs released in the past 5 years > support all x86 CPUs released in the past 10 years > support all x86 CPUs released ever > [ ... or configure a specific model ] > > and people/distributions would use _those_ switches. That means we could > continuously tweak those targets, as systems become obsolete and new > CPUs arrive. That's just *asking* for flame mail if somebody builds a kernel for a system that's 4 year 9 months old, and he builds a kernel 6 months later, and it fails to boot because the CPU is now 3 months out and we've deprecated it... Quick - what year/month was the CPU you're using now released? No peeking. ;) (For the record, I have no *clue* when Intel actually released the Core2 T7200, which is a whole *nother* can of worms - the chip release date can be quite some time before the system vendor ships, and when the consumer actually buys it - it's quite possible that we can write "released in the past 5 years", a user looks at it and says "I bought this system 4 years 2 months ago", and think he's OK, but he's not because he bought a system released 4 years 9 months ago that used a chipset released 5 years 6 months ago... --==_Exmh_1220905541_3062P Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 iD8DBQFIxYpFcC3lWbTT17ARApiwAJ4xiuWdeenfwT+PR54drwpmcUTMcwCfVvOj 5vu7RYS0y5KyTkI9P+GNROA= =2l6d -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --==_Exmh_1220905541_3062P--