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A comment on The Illumos Syscall Handler. Parent comment

Re:The Illumos Syscall Handler by rkeene2 on Saturday May 21, 2016 @01:24PM (#11745395)
It's been a long time since Solaris worked well on a 32-bit CPU. UltraSPARC replaced SPARC in the 90s, and Solaris on x86 was not a very common thing then. It wasn't until Solaris 10/OpenSolaris (around 2005) that the x86 port was really viable, and then 64-bit CPUs were really recommended (especially after ZFS came out in Update 1)
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Re:The Illumos Syscall Handler by cwp on Saturday May 21, 2016 @04:22PM (#11746031)
Even so, the syscall handler would have been written early in the development of the x86 port, well before it was "viable" for customers. Relying on quad-word instructions in hand-written assembly for such a crucial part of the OS would have meant no 32-bit support at all. That's probably not a good product decision even today, but at the time, it would have been crazy.
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Re:The Illumos Syscall Handler by ryao on Saturday May 21, 2016 @04:40PM (#11746093)
If there is going to be a debate over how mov performs versus push/pop, someone should just go ahead and change it. The time talking about it would be better spent on other things.
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