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On 3/6/08, Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com> wrote:On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 05:12:07PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:It's a kernel bug, and it needs to be fixed.I'm not convinced. It's been that way for 15 years, it's that way in the BSD kernels, at that point it's a feature. The bug is in the documentation, nowhere else. And in gcc for blindly trusting the documentation.
The issue should not be evaluated as: "It's always been that way, therefore, it's right." Instead, it should be: "What's the right way to do it?"
You don't just change documentation because no existing code meets the requirement -- UNLESS -- the non-conforming code is actually the right way to do things.
Another story, the sad story of the intel chip (I think it was the 80188) where Intel made use of Int 5, which was documented as reserved. Unfortunately, Microsoft/IBM had used this for print screen or some such. Intel was absolutely right that their documentation was clear and it was wrong to have used these interrupts .. but the result was a warehouse of unused chips.
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