Jan Schmidt was once rumoured to have said: > On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 13:54 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > <quote who="O Plameras"> > > > > > Architecture wise, some changes from i386 to i586: > > > > But crucially, few of these things are interesting at the kernel > > level. Apps can take advantage of CPU features like these > > regardless of the architecture the kernel was built for. > > > > The only one that really needs kernel help is MMX/SSE stuff, but that > works regardless of the architecture the kernel is built for, provided > it's a recent enough kernel.
Actually, only the SSE instruction sets require kernel support - MMX and 3dnow overload the FP registers and hence don't usually require any additional support. SSE, OTOH, uses a new set of registers for operations which the kernel needs to be aware of to handle context save/restore for. C. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
