cvs commit: src/lib/libc/i386/net htonl.S ntohl.S

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <200410191541.54269.jhb at FreeBSD.org>
            John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> writes:
: On Tuesday 19 October 2004 10:43 am, you wrote:
: > In message: <20041019073145.GA29746 at thingy.tbd.co.nz>
: >
: >             Andrew Thompson <andy at fud.org.nz> writes:
: > : > I am afraid that recompiling a kernel on i386 will require several
: > : > days.
: > :
: > : Chicken and the egg. To support i386 it must be recompiled, so you would
: > : have to do it on another box anyway.
: >
: > The only people that will seriously want to use i386 these days are
: > the folks that build embedded systems.  Those you have to build on
: > some host then deploy to the target system.
: >
: > There are some benefits to having i386 in the tree.  However, there
: > are also a number of different places in the tree where things are
: > sub-optimal because we still have support for i386 in there.  The
: > desire to remove them is to make FreeBSD go faster on more modern
: > hardware.
: 
: I think 6.0 is the place to drop 80386, not 5.x.  I'm already working on a p4 
: branch (jhb_no386) to remove 80396 support from HEAD, but I think 5.x should 
: be left as is in this regard.

That was the agreement some months ago.  5.x would have it
de-emphasized to allow easier optimizations, and 6.0 would actually
remove it unless there was some really compelling reason not to.  So
far, none of the arguments have come close to getting to compelling,
let alone really compelling.

The low end of most intel based embedded is the Elan chipset these
days, and old 386 desktops are rare.  Support for i386 negatively
impacts certain low level routines in a number of ways.  But we've
been through all before when we came to the agreement:

	5.x wouldn't support it out of the box, but the clueful can
	coax 386 support out of the source tree.  No one was to do
	anything to break it.  If someone accidentally did break it,
	it was the resonsibility of the 386 fans to fix it.  This has
	happened at least once that I'm aware of.

	6.x would remove support for i386 entirely, unless some really
        compelling reason was presented that wasn't present in the
        original discussion.

David's commits do nothing to change the above, nor were they intended
to do so.  Nothing in the ensuing discussion has changed it either, so
we're back to the original agreement.  I'm posting it here for clarity.

Warner