On Tue, 16 May 2000, Tim Rightnour wrote:

> On 16-May-00 Kevin P. Neal wrote:
> >> Enabling DUMMY_NOPS eliminates the nops in i/o, which are only
> >> neccessary on some very old machines.
> > 
> > How do you know if it is safe on an old machine to enable DUMMY_NOPS?
> 
> You don't really.  I have only had one machine that had problems with this, a
> very old 386-40.  I've never seen anything else with trouble.  it's pretty safe
> to test out, as basically the machine just wedges solid in the first few
> seconds.  It's not like silent data corruption will occur.
> 
> I've never seen a 486 with this problem.  (thats not to say they don't exist)

Maybe it's time to uncomment that in the default GENERIC. Can you even
run a GENERIC kernel on a typical 386/4Mb?