Can't help but agree. I especially don't like removing ring3 I/O port access. It was/is the fastest way to trap out of a VM without SYSCALL or some other mechan

Can't help but agree. I especially don't like removing ring3 I/O port access. It was/is the fastest way to trap out of a VM without SYSCALL or some other mechanism that I could measure. Segmentation also has its uses, and it's a shame that they are steadily removing it. Having a way to set up a 1:1 memory range without even touching the page tables has always been faster than messing with pages. Indeed, it's always been more performance to either have a fully static page table or just disable it completely and run in 32-bit mode. For certain tasks, it's still the fastest. But these are all niche uses. These days, who thinks about anything other than Windows and Linux use cases? To me though, AMD64 made most problems go away, and the architecture is just fine. Perhaps they want to do away with many of the now rarely used instructions?