Re: [Q] Looking for an emulation for CMOV* instructions.

[Andi Kleen]

Alan Cox <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
> The kernel isnt there to fix up the fact authors can't read. Its also very
> hard to get emulations right. I grant that this wasn't helped by the fact
> the gcc x86 folks also couldnt read the pentium pro manual correctly.

One corner case where emulation would IMHO make sense would be CMPXCHG8.
It would allow to do efficient inline mutexes in pthreads, and hit the
emulation only on 386/486. cpu feature flag checking is unfortunately
not an option normally for inline code.

-Andi (who would have already done it if he had an 486/386 to test)