Deorbiting i386

[Andrew Turner]

> On 27 May 2018, at 23:15, Maxim Sobolev <sobomax at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> Well, strip extra 32 bits, use slower memory and busses (extra decoding logic etc). Voila, you suddenly have platform that can run 99% of code in wild today with just few hundred mW of power. Try that with arm32, you would be surprised how many software is technically compiling and all that, but has some weird runtime issues with either byte order or unaligned memory accesses. Not even mention performance issues due to the lack of hand-crafted JITs.

If you’re having byte order issues on arm you will have them on x86 as they are both little endian, and modern arm (last ~10 years) handles unaligned access.

You’ll also find there is a lot of code designed for use on battery powered Arm CPUs, they are used in almost all mobile phones, meaning many popular JITs have been ported.

Andrew