3 ms·

Illumos (Solaris) has been around for a while. It was probably written in the 32-bit era.

• rkeene2 10y ago
  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)
  • cwp 10y ago
    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.
    • ryao 10y ago
      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.