Maxim S. Shatskih wrote:
> I don’t understand your point, Maxim. Portability between what and what?
>All these RISC machines, and now IA64.
Having the OS unportable to any other CPU even theoretically is a bad idea.
Nonsense. The ring 1 thing would be implementation detail of the x86
kernels – an added benefit available on architectures that had multiple
levels of protection. It certainly wouldn’t require any source code
changes in drivers, so I am unclear on how it would affect portability.
There are certainly precedents for this. NT supports I/O ports, even
though those do not exist on non-x86 architectures. It supports memory
barriers, even though those only have meaning for certain architectures.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.