Re: [Xen-devel] i686 requirements

[Mark Williamson <Mark.Williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Off the top of my head, 3 reasons that I know of:

1) Xen requires a local APIC for its timer functionality.  There is some 
compatibility stuff for non local-APIC chips to enable running VMWare but it 
isn't often used AFAIK.
2) I'm not sure Xen includes all of the skanky fixups for the implementation 
bugs in various older chips anymore.
3) Xen needs an rdtsc instruction and not all older chips have it (although I 
believe there was an implementation in Intel's Pentium not all manufacturers 
included it immediately)

I don't know how much work would be involved in running modern versions of Xen 
on these older machines.  I was going to try this a while back but never got 
round to it and things have moved on since then...

HTH,
Mark

On Friday 07 January 2005 12:34, Antonio Vargas wrote:
> Regarding XEN requirements to run, I'd like to know if there is any
> important reason to require i686-class cpus (ie: ppro, p2, etc.. and
> k7...). In my limited understanding of 386 arch, ppro added
> conditional moves and PAE, perhaps even huge-pages (have to check this
> one). Is XEN explicitely (as in, used directly on assembler code)
> using any of these?
>
> My motivation is getting XEN to run on my (aging) k6 server machine.
>
> Greets anyways :)


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