Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 22:58:43 -0500 From: "Charles Swiger" <cswiger@mac.com> To: <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Cyrix CPUs, was: Re: Repeatable crash from nautilus2 Message-ID: <004901c2a25c$0c381c50$0301a8c0@prime> References: <20021213021012.61714.qmail@web40303.mail.yahoo.com>
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Rhett Monteg Hollander wrote: [ ... ] > What Cyrix CPU? And what OS'es? And maybe vice versa? > I do remember hard issues with WinNT 3.51 and original > Win'95 when running on Cyrix 5x86\6x86 or NexGen > Nx586. NEXTSTEP/Intel 3.1 - OPENSTEP 4.2; do a search for OmniWeb, which was a common multithreaded WWW client for that platform which tended to trigger hardware panics on non-Intel CPUs like the Cyrix. LINT under FreeBSD also appears to have a relevant section: # CPU_BTB_EN enables branch target buffer on Cyrix 5x86 (NOTE 1). # # CPU_DIRECT_MAPPED_CACHE sets L1 cache of Cyrix 486DLC CPU in direct # mapped mode. Default is 2-way set associative mode. # # CPU_CYRIX_NO_LOCK enables weak locking for the entire address space # of Cyrix 6x86 and 6x86MX CPUs by setting the NO_LOCK bit of CCR1. # Otherwise, the NO_LOCK bit of CCR1 is cleared. (NOTE 3) [ ... ] # NOTE 1: The options, CPU_BTB_EN, CPU_LOOP_EN, CPU_IORT, # CPU_LOOP_EN and CPU_RSTK_EN should not be used because of CPU bugs. # These options may crash your system. # # NOTE 2: If CYRIX_CACHE_REALLY_WORKS is not set, CPU cache is enabled # in write-through mode when revision < 2.7. If revision of Cyrix # 6x86 >= 2.7, CPU cache is always enabled in write-back mode. # # NOTE 3: This option may cause failures for software that requires # locked cycles in order to operate correctly. Yum. Sounds tasty. -Chuck PS: I think the guys at NeXT decided that the x86 platform had enough issues without trying to work around broken hardware; in hindsight, that may have been a wrong decision, but I'm still using a 33MHz 68040 NeXTstation as a primary machine. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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