various rants about 7-currnet on AMD64

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2007-Oct-01 05:04:43 +0000, Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The CPUTYPE is amd64 because at the time the instruction set was
...
>That doesn't negate the confusion... perhaps just mentioning that it
>works for all x86 and multi core x86 should suffice in hardware.txt
>and prominently in some place that newbies will see it.

That would be a very silly idea because not all current x86 CPUs
support amd64/em64t extensions.  The AMD stickers are fairly clear
about whether the chip supports 64-bit or not.  Intel's naming
scheme makes it far harder to work out the chip capabilities.
AFAIK, it's supported on the later P4 chips, some Core chips
(not mobile ones) and all Core2 chips.  No other vendors support
amd64 and the low-end AMD/Intel chips don't support it.

The sure-fire way is to check for the "LM" feature,

http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64.html already notes that
amd64 encompasses the Intel EM64T extensions.  If you believe
more needs to be done, please submit a documentation PR giving
patches.

>I think since it is clear that at least on a p35 mobo it is the only
>suitable one we may want to consider saying something.

Please submit a documentation PR to add this to the supported motherboards
list.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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