KS2012: Supporting old/oddball architectures, tool chains, and devices

Posted Sep 6, 2012 23:10 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: KS2012: Supporting old/oddball architectures, tool chains, and devices by gb
Parent article: KS2012: Supporting old/oddball architectures, tool chains, and devices

> Presence of emulators also means that you have no need to search for old 386 hardware to test 386 support.

This assumes that the emulator is perfect.

There are differences between different flavors of 386 chips that sometimes trip things up.

As a smoke test and emulator is Ok, but it doesn't replace all testing on real hardware.

KS2012: Supporting old/oddball architectures, tool chains, and devices

Posted Sep 10, 2012 18:02 UTC (Mon) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

Indeed. For a while there was a bug in the 'alternatives' code that would cause 386 and 486 processors to crash because it patched an instruction that was already fetched into the pipeline. (Later processors will flush the pipeline in this case. These differences in behaviour are documented, by the way.) I very much doubt that, say, QEMU simulates processor behaviour down to this level - that would tend to make it much slower.