thus Jason Thorpe spake:
> 
> On Jul 11, 2006, at 7:11 AM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> 
>> AFAIK, MMX and SSE have _nothing_ to do with floating point.  It may be
>> true that these are _also_ unsafe in the kernel, for the same reasons
>> that floating point is unsafe (i.e. they aren't saved on context
>> switches) -- maybe someone familiar with the i386 port can verify?
> 
> Their registers overlap the FPU.

hm, putting my PowerPC hat aside, IIRC this is obsolete since SSE2 [0].

with SSE4 intel seems to have the same efficiency as a G4 has since 1999 ;)

> They are also unsafe to use.

as is hyperthreading (cache snooping between cores).

[0] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2

timo